Drawing Out the Stars
by Cinis
Summary: Forced to make an emergency jump to hyperspace without navigation, direction, or means to decelerate, Antiope is sent hurtling through the treacherous deep core. However, before she can meet a quick end crashing into a star, her ship is pulled from its death-seeking flight by an entity she can hardly comprehend: Menalippe. [Space AU] [Antiope/Menalippe]
1. Chapter 1

_This is a holiday gift for my beta reader and friend, Cherepashka_

* * *

 **Drawing Out the Stars: Chapter One**

* * *

Alarms blare.

The long corridors of the _Themyscira_ are a blur to Antiope as she hurtles down them at a dead run, dodging past other crew sprinting to their own battle stations. The sound of her boots slamming against the steel deck is lost in all the chaos of a capital ship ambushed. When she comes to a corner, she grabs hold of the rail bolted to the wall of the hallway and uses it to slingshot herself around the turn without losing momentum. In her ear, her comm unit buzzes with her sister's voice.

"Menelaus found us. We've been pulled out of hyperspace by an interdictor, just us," Hippolyta says. Her voice is calm, the kind of calm that a commander fakes in the heat of a crisis to make sure subordinates don't panic. "Blow the ship or blow its generators, then get back. We've been separated from the fleet and need to run. Over."

"Copy. Over," Antiope shouts. With every siren on the ship screaming, she hopes her sister heard her.

It's a simple plan. She likes simple plans. Get in her fighter, get her pilots up, blow a ship, come home.

Antiope turns three more corners before she reaches the hanger. Mechanics are rushing to finish flight checks on fighters as pilots scramble up into them. Everyone is yelling. Breathing hard, Antiope doesn't stop running until she's got her hands on the ladder up into her cockpit and even then she's yanking herself up as fast as she can. She was half a mile from the hanger when the alarms started and she's one of the last pilots to reach their craft.

Hera and Zeus. She's getting old.

She's almost at the top of the ladder when someone grabs her ankle.

Antiope twists around.

It's her niece. It's Diana.

Antiope swears. "What are you doing here?" Antiope should have been launching two minutes ago. She's flight commander for the squadrons of the _Themyscira_ and her pilots need her. Every second she spends on the deck is a second the _Themyscira_ doesn't have. When the enemy capital ships reach firing range, their shields won't hold long.

"I want to launch," Diana shouts up at her. "This is what I've been training for." She hasn't let go of Antiope's ankle.

Antiope kicks free of Diana's hold. "Not now, Diana," she shouts back. Diana's too young for a desperation run. Too young to handle it. Too young to die.

Antiope hauls herself the rest of the way up and drops into her cockpit seat. She hits the switch for the clear blastshield to lower down over her then starts her other preflight systems. She can buckle in once she's up.

Even before her canopy blastshield is down, she hits her stabilizers for lift.

Finally, _finally_ , she takes a deep, steadying, breath. Her heart is still racing. From now until she's in space, the speed limit is her ship. Nothing she does now can get her out of the hangar any faster. Antiope taps her comms. "All squads, this is flight leader," she says. "Squad leads, report status. Over."

The first voice that answers her is Penthesilea. Ship comms aren't the best and her voice is filled with static. "Alpha lead, Alpha is green. Over." she says.

Artemis is next. Her voice is deeper than Penthesilea's. "Beta lead, Beta green. Over."

One by one, the other fighter squadrons report in. All pilots are in place and most squadrons are already airborne.

Antiope herself is finally passing through the magwall, leaving the hangar and slipping into the black of space. "All squads, we're blowing the interdictor gens and then scrambling," she says. "Emphasis on the scrambling. Form up on me." As Antiope finishes speaking, she reaches out and hits her thrusters. There's no gravity in free space, but even so the press of the seat into her back tells her she's accelerating, _fast_.

Starfighters are the fastest manmade spacecraft in the galaxy. Even flying into the maws of battle, there's a certain thrill to so much raw speed.

The enemy fleet—six capital ships and at least ten support vessels according to Antiope's readout—is over thirty klicks out but she and her pilots will be there in a minute. It helps that the enemy fleet is going full speed towards them as well.

Antiope and her pilots need to blow an escape for the _Themyscira_ before the enemy reach capital engagement range.

Grim, Antiope switches her display to show her own forces. She has six squadrons of ten fighters, plus herself. Although it's the flagship for the Amazonian fleet, the _Themyscira_ carries a slightly reduced complement. Antiope and her squad leaders are picky about who they choose to fly with them. Measured by kills, they're one of the better fighter teams in the fleet. Measured by survival rate, they're the best by a wide margin. The average life expectancy of a pilot after beginning service is three glory- and adrenaline-filled years, fewer in recent times. Many of the pilots of the _Themyscira_ were flying before the start of the war nine years ago. Survival in the chaos of a dogfight is about _trust_. When the entire squad trusts that their squad mates will die for them, everyone is more likely to come out alive.

Not that there's ever an engagement where no one fails to come home.

Antiope keeps a tally of enemies she's blasted in gold paint on the hull of her fighter.

She keeps a tally of friends who've died for her in scratch marks etched into the low ceiling above her bunk.

Antiope's eyes narrow at her display. She has six squadrons of ten fighters, plus herself, plus…

Antiope taps her comm unit to hail the rogue ship, trying to ignore how cold she suddenly feels. "Diana, get back, now," she snarls.

There's silence on the line.

Antiope transfers to add Hippolyta to the line. "Fleet Admiral," she snaps.

"Flight leader, what is it?" Hippolyta replies. There's tension in her voice. She's relying on Antiope and the fighters to get the _Themyscira_ free to jump. There's little for her to do on the command bridge except pray to the gods and hope they listen. This means she has far more time than Antiope does to deal with Diana.

"Get your daughter back on the ship," Antiope says, keeping her growing fury under tight control. "She's has too much to live for to be out here."

There's a moment of silence, then Hippolyta, free to feel the terrified anger that Antiope can't spare right now, " _Diana!_ "

Antiope severs the link. She's thirteen seconds from engagement. The angular interdictor ship looms close, the delta of Laconia painted in red on the side of its light grey hull. Dealing with Diana has taken precious moments that she needed to plan the assault. _Shit_. She needs to work quickly. "This is flight leader. Alpha Squad, on me, we're hitting the front door," she says. "Beta, you're first bombing run. Gamma and Delta provide cover. Epsilon and Zeta, you've got discretion, do what you need to do. I'll see you all in Elysium. Over."

In front of them, a screen of dark enemy fighters, red faction marks on their wings, swarms forward in tight formation.

Fighters move too fast for most heavy ship guns. The most effective way to take down a fighter is with another fighter.

In the last half-second before collision, Antiope slips into her quiet place.

She picks her first target.

She adjusts her course, lining up her cannons.

She fires.

In the space of heartbeats, the blackness of space is alight with burning, broken, ships. Antiope's ears ring with the shouting of her pilots and the blasting of her own weapons. She spins in space, weaving this way and that, dodging enemy shots and blowing their fighters to Hades. She never got around to strapping in—a rookie mistake, so she's only staying in her seat by the grace of a combination of her fighter's gravity booster and bracing her knees against her control panel.

On her face is a wild smile, both grim and ecstatic all at once.

Antiope is never so alive as when she's dancing at death's door in the black of space.

Her eyes are bright with explosions.

There's a bare inch of clear blastshield separating her from the universe.

This is what it means to _live_.

This adrenaline ecstasy is what separates pilots from deck gunners and flight leaders from bridge commanders.

Penthesilea's voice rises above the rest of the chaos on comms. "Alpha to Beta, approach clear. Over."

Artemis's voice comes back. "Copy. Going in. Over."

At once, the ten fighters that make up Beta Squad disengage from the skirmish and start towards the interdictor.

No, not ten.

Nine.

Antiope sights another enemy fighter and shoots. The ship goes up in a short blast of fire, quickly dying in the vacuum.

Their friends for hers. That's how it works.

The explosions of the run against the interdictor are massive enough that the shockwaves buffet Antiope's craft off course. She almost slams into a friendly fighter but manages to correct in time to avoid killing them both.

"Beta to flight," Artemis calls over comms, voice full of static. "Generators down. Over."

Antiope's smile widens. "Copy," she says. "All squads, scramble. Over."

At her command, every surviving Amazonian fighter spins around and engages to full, blasting back towards the _Themyscira_. The enemy fighters follow a half-second later. That they follow in enough time to realistically catch the retreating Amazons is impressive. It's not that the enemy men are bad, it's just that Antiope's pilots are _better_.

Scrambling back to base, Antiope jukes fast and natural. She's been flying for two decades. She still rides the heady rush from of having an enemy on her tail shooting at her, but there's enough calm here to think about other things too.

Slipping expertly between two laser blasts, Antiope glances at her display.

Minimal casualties. Everyone's scrambling. Except…

Hippolyta's voice crackles to life on comms at the same moment Antiope sees it. All the raw panic Hippolyta has been keeping at bay for the sake of her command is here now in her voice. "Antiope, help Diana!"

Everyone's scrambling except Diana. She has three enemy fighters tailing her.

Antiope swears. Antiope swears by every god she can name as she spins out and jets towards the straggler. Fucking hotshot kid—best pilot Antiope's ever seen, including herself, but too damn young and green for an engagement this messy. "I'll get her," Antiope tells her sister, voice tight. She hits her thrusters for more speed.

If one of Menelaus' pilots doesn't kill Diana, by Zeus and the stars, when they get back to _Themyscira_ , Antiope will. If Hippolyta doesn't get there first.

The fighters chasing Diana aren't expecting anyone to help her. They expect their enemy to be like them. Their mistake. Antiope vapes the first one effortlessly.

The second manages to turn on her, but she lands a hit right on the cockpit and not even a blastshield can stop a dead-center cannon shot.

The third fighter—

 _Shit_.

 _Diana_.

Antiope acts without thinking.

She's a pilot.

It's just how she is.

[] [] []

The impact is brutal.

Antiope's head slams into her control panel.

She never buckled in.

Her world goes black.

[] [] []

When Antiope comes to, every alarm that her ship has is wailing.

Her stabilizers are _gone_. Her cannons no longer exist. Her readout is showing critical failure in systems she didn't even realize she had. Her hands dart across her controls and her fizzling displays but nothing she can do from her cockpit will repair mechanical damage to her fighter. The most she can do is turn off the damn sirens. She does so with a vengeance. When she's done, she slams a fist into her blastshield.

Outside, another Amazon hits the third fighter, erasing fighter and pilot in an instant. It goes by so fast Antiope can't read the Amazon ship's squad marks. Then, it turns and continues to scramble.

It all happens in silence. Space is bad at sound.

Antiope snarls and taps to activate her comm unit.

She doesn't even hear static.

Her comm unit is dead.

 _She's dead_.

 _Shit_.

 _SHIT_.

…

So that's it.

Antiope feels suddenly empty and cold. Without the blare of ship alarms, without the chatter of her pilots, it's so horribly quiet. Blood trickles down her forehead to drip a path along her cheek.

Without her stabilizers, she can't steer her ship. She can go forward, but she can't direct her path. That's as good as _nothing_ in space.

She can't even shift enough to watch her pilots escape. She can't even shift enough to watch the _Themyscira_ jump away.

Without her comm unit…

She can't even tell her family goodbye.

Shit.

Antiope lets her head fall back against her seat. Eyes wide and unblinking, she stares straight ahead through her blastshield into the starlit dark of space.

Diana was too young to die.

Antiope wasn't.

Antiope takes a deep breath. She inhales the recycled air in her cockpit. She exhales. She inhales again. She exhales again.

Diana.

Hippolyta.

Family.

Comms.

She looks down from her blastshield back to her controls. She needs comms. She needs comms now more than she needs stabilizers, more than she needs cannons, more than she needs life support. So how does she get comms back?

Antiope growls deep in her throat as she stares at her malfunctioning display. She can't get comms back if she doesn't know why comms are down. The obvious answer— _because she's been shot_ —isn't specific enough for her needs. She taps her display, hoping it will register her command. It does.

 _Power_.

Her comms don't have power.

Well, that's easy enough. With a stable generator and most other systems blown out, she has more than enough of that. So it's a matter then of getting a steady reroute without frying anything with an overload.

Antiope can do that.

She can do it because she needs to do it.

And she needs to do it fast. It took a bare minute for her fighters to reach the enemy fleet from the _Themyscira_. It will take slightly longer for them to land and lock down, but once they're onboard, the _Themyscira_ will jump.

Antiope flicks through her controls. She transfers power from her blown radar. It works on the first try. Static buzzes in her ear. She doesn't have time to set a channel and all her defaults are wiped, so she broadcasts on all of them. "Hippolyta? Diana?"

In return, there's nothing. Just static.

Antiope's heart tries to stop, to… to just suspend her in a moment that stretches out forever.

The moment passes.

Her heart beats.

She closes her eyes. She raises a hand to her aching head, stops when she feels sticky blood, lowers her hand again, opens her eyes, looks out into space.

They're gone.

They're—

"Antiope? Antiope?" Hippolyta's voice is unmistakable, even distorted as it is by gods know what kinds of mechanical interference from Antiope's mangled ship. "Antiope?"

"I'm here, Poly," Antiope says. "Did Diana make it?"

"She did, she—"

"Aunt Antiope?" Diana's voice is broken in a way that Hippolyta's is not. It's not just the interference on the line.

Antiope grins. A bit of blood from her cheek slides into her mouth. It tastes like metal and salt. "Hey, wonder kid," Antiope says. Antiope licks her lips, looking for her voice. She tastes more blood. A second passes, a second she doesn't have. She's been listening to pilots say goodbye for her entire adult life. Nothing she's ever heard said has made the ache hurt any less. She wants to do better than that. But there's no time. "I love you."

"Antiope, we have to jump," Hippolyta says. In the background, Diana is crying.

Antiope hangs on to every static-distorted contour of her sister's voice. She burns it into her mind. "I know," she says. "Love you, Poly."

"I love you too, Ant—"

Hippolyta's voice cuts out.

They're gone.

 _They're gone_.

they're gone.

That was it.

That was everything.

 _It was worth it._

Antiope's eyes sting. They stay dry though.

Sadness brings tears.

Raw despair brings nothing.

But—

But at least Diana is alive.

When Antiope was twenty, her best friend died.

She died in a time of peace, before the war. She died in a small skirmish against pirates along one of the lesser trade lanes. She died ramming her fighter into a gunboat that had a lock on Antiope.

Now, sitting in silent space, Venelia's wordless scream, filled with comm static and fury, echoes in Antiope's head. They'd been bunk-mates for all five years of flight school and they'd stayed together on assignment for the two years they'd flown together after that.

And then—

A wordless scream filled with static and fury, cut short by silence.

Antiope closes her eyes and she doesn't see Diana and the last fighter and herself. She sees all the things she could have done differently years ago. They've rattled around in her head for so long, dry and brittle and _loud_ , horribly _loud_.

Venelia was the first tally in the ceiling above Antiope's bunk.

She scratched it into the steel with her pocket knife and it was almost like her friend was still there with her.

Venelia was Antiope's first tally.

Now Antiope will be Diana's.

She's paid it forward.

Antiope traces a finger over the path that the blood's taken down her face. It comes away sticky with the stuff. On a whim, she reaches up and smears the crimson across her blastshield. Illuminated only by the soft glowing of what controls she has that haven't blown out, it smudge is hard to make out against the background of stars.

Antiope always thought she'd die in a blaze of glory, blown to nothing by cannon fire.

She still _could_ blow herself away.

There's a one-shot blaster under her seat—a ticket to Hades that comes standard in every cockpit—but the stars are beautiful and Antiope isn't ready yet.

She'd like to watch the stars a while.

The _Themyscira_ was pulled out of hyperspace. She's somewhere deep in the galactic core, but she doesn't know where. The stars here are alien. She doesn't recognize any constellation. This is fine though. She can draw her own patterns.

The first shape she finds is, she thinks, a lot like a _Leto_ -class frigate, the most common capital ship spec in the Amazonian fleet. Antiope smirks at herself. Wishful thinking.

The next shape, she tries to look past ships and guns and war. It's dead ahead and it looks… a little bit like a horse, maybe. A black horse, visible only because of the starry pinpricks of light that form an outline around it.

Antiope's comms crackle.

"This is the dreadnaught _Sparta_ , hailing. Over."

Whatever tranquility Antiope had been scraping together vanishes in an instant. She stares at her display panel, barely breathing. She doesn't answer.

The _Sparta_ doesn't need her answer.

"Flight Leader Antiope," a man says. "This is Vice-Admiral Menelaus. That was a very touching goodbye you just shared."

Antiope finally speaks. "Let me die in peace," she growls.

"I'm afraid that's not possible," Menelaus answers. "You're too valuable. We're sending a shuttle to retrieve you. Don't do anything rash in the meantime. Dead bodies are less valuable than living ones."

The blood still trickling slowly down Antiope's face is warm but the blood in her veins feels very, very cold. There are a few things in the galaxy known to be worse than death. Capture by the Lakedaimonians is one of them.

Craning her neck, Antiope tries to check every bit of space visible through her blastshield, looking for the Lakedaimonian shuttle. She can't see it. How close is it? Antiope's heart beats loud in her ears, overwhelming the quiet of space.

Antiope reaches down for her blaster.

If she aims just right…

Her hand closes on the weapon.

Then she lets go.

No. It's not sure to work and she already decided she wasn't ready yet. She still has options.

Grim, she goes over her displays again. She still has options. What are they?

Stabilizers are gone, and gone in such a way she can't repair them from her cockpit. Her generator is fine. She could wait until the shuttle reaches her and then self-destruct, try taking the shuttle with her. No—they'll probably put a lock on her systems as soon as they're in range. What does she have that still works?

Antiope flips through her readout, looking for something, anything, that still works.

The hyperdrive.

Of all things.

Of all things, her _hyperdrive_ is still functional.

Mouth set in a thin line, Antiope hits the toggle to begin spooling.

She has no ability to adjust her course, no ability to navigate. She's a hundred thousand times more likely to hit a star and vaporize herself than she is to pop out near anything inhabited. But maybe, just maybe, she'll be yanked out of hyperspace by a gravitational shadow and she'll be able to go back to dying on her own terms. In peace.

Menelaus' voice crackles up again over her comm. "Flight Leader Antiope, what are you doing?"

Antiope chuffs. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"In your condition, that's suicide," Menelaus says. "An unpleasant way to go."

Antiope's display indicates that her hyperdrive is primed. She routes all non-essential power to it. She might as well go as far as she can as fast as she can. That's how she's lived the rest of her life, after all. "The best kind of death is the one you choose for yourself," Antiope says. "And this is better than having to meet you. Over."

She kills her comms. Non-essential.

And then she flips the switch.

And then she's gone.

[] [] []

The view in hyperspace leave something to be desired.

It's just black. Inky dark. No stars. No light at all.

Antiope closes her eyes.

She drifts towards unconsciousness.

Before she goes though, she thinks of her niece and her sister.

If she hits a star in her sleep and that's the last of her, she wants her last thoughts to be of her family.

[] [] []

Antiope wakes and fades again several times.

She is growing increasingly thirsty.

Time is passing.

She's bought herself time.

' _The best kind of death is the one you choose for yourself._ '

Antiope thinks that perhaps that is what she should have said to Diana.

It has a poetry to it.

She didn't think of it herself. Niobe told it to her once. She told it to Antiope the third flight before she died. She hadn't actually had any true last words—just a surprised shout as she was erased from existence by enemy fire. Another tally for the ceiling above Antiope's bunk.

Niobe… Antiope isn't sure if it's right for her to sit in her metal coffin, hurtling through the galaxy so many times faster than light, remembering the feel of a dead woman's hands on her skin, but she's dead herself so she does it anyway.

Maybe she'll see Niobe again on the other side.

[] [] []

The thirst is making her delirious.

She sees her sister, young, playing with a newborn Diana and laughing.

Antiope misses Hippolyta's laugh. She hasn't heard it in so many years.

Now, in her head, she hears it and she smiles.

[] [] []

There's a blaster under her seat.

One shot.

[] [] []

The exit from hyperspace is smooth, so smooth that Antiope wakes peaceful instead of with a start.

Her vision is blurry.

She rubs her eyes, her fingers chipping flakes of dried blood from her skin as she does so.

At first she doesn't understand what it is she sees on the other side of her blastshield.

It's not stars.

It's not a planet.

It's a _ship_.

It's a ship, dark and angular, so large that it exists on a planetary scale.

Antiope gapes. She has never seen a manmade structure so enormous. She has never _dreamed_ a ship like the one she sees now.

If she has never dreamed it before, she cannot be imagining it now, surely.

But so too it is too large to exist.

Is she dead then?

Is this Elysium?

Elysium is existence after death. Hades is the void.

Huh. She sort of always suspected she'd killed too many people and had gone to temple not nearly enough to make it.

Her fighter is moving towards the ship, though she's not piloting it and her engines are silent. From the nature of the movement, she thinks she's in a tractor lock of some kind.

Antiope routes power back to her comm unit. She chooses a blanket broadcast. "This is Flight Leader Antiope of the Amazonian Confederation, hailing. Over."

A voice, a woman's voice, returns over the comm. It's free of static. No interspace comm system in the universe can do that. Antiope must be dead. Really, truly.

The voice is making noises that Antiope supposes are probably within the human vocal range, but they don't come together to form any language she recognizes. There's a melodic quality to the sounds though, or perhaps there's a melodic quality to the voice. It's deep and has a resonance that comes across even through the comm unit.

The word, Antiope thinks, is _soothing_.

The evidence that she has made the crossing and Elysium is a giant ship is mounting quickly.

Whatever tractor she's in works quickly. It's not long at all before Antiope's ship has been brought into a brightly lit white hangar and is being set down gently.

The lights here are stark white and the walls and floors are polished to a shine. The brilliance of the hangar is nearly blinding. No hangar that Antiope has seen has ever been so clean, so free of scorch marks and dents. There is something _wrong_ about this one. What's more, it's very, very empty.

The hairs on her arms are standing up.

There's a great grinding noise behind her. Antiope twists in her seat to look backwards. Enormous blast doors are closing over the hanger entrance, shutting out the stars beyond.

She can't leave now.

She's hungry, thirsty, near to hallucination, but she is not so depleted that her heart can't speed to a terrified frenzy.

This place, this ship—she is trapped and alone.

Antiope catches a bit of movement out of the corner of her eye. She whips her head around to stare. One of the hangar doors to the interior of the ship has opened and a strange spider-like droid, a spherical white thing with far too many thin metal legs, has come scuttling out. It is followed by four others that look just like it. Together, they swarm over the floor towards her.

Antiope's breath comes fast. Her eyes are wide. She's frozen in place.

She is not in Elysium.

She does not know where she is.

The spider droids crawl up onto her fighter, sharp feet leaving small pockmarks in their wake. One of the spiders comes up to stand over the blastshield, right by Antiope's face. On its stomach is a shimmering lens. It lifts itself up, pointing the lens directly at Antiope. There's a flicker of light, then steady light.

A hologram projection appears inside Antiope's cockpit, rendered in full color and vivid in its detail. It moves fluidly in a way that holograms, flickering and stiff, never do.

It's a woman, dressed strangely with confusion written across her features. She's wearing some sort of red and gold armor, so archaic that Antiope has only seen the likes of it in religious texts hidden away in long-destroyed archives. A crimson cloak hangs form her shoulders. Her long brown hair is tied back in a braid and there's a sort of metal-looking headpiece covering her forehead. When she speaks, it's in the same soothing voice that Antiope heard in her ship out in space—and now as then she's completely unintelligible.

Antiope takes a steadying breath, trying to tamp down on her naked terror. "I don't understand you," she says.

The projection of the woman frowns. It says something else, then fizzles out.

On the other side of Antiope's blastshield, the spider-droid curls one of its appendages into a sort of fist and raps on the clear glass.

Antiope understands that well enough. The droid—the woman?—wants the blastshield open.

Antiope is not sure that Antiope wants the blastshield open.

When she hesitates, the spider-droid takes a step back. Another takes its place, slightly larger, slightly meaner looking, so much as a white spider-droid can look mean. It sits back on four appendages and raises its remaining four. They look very sharp.

Before they descend on Antiope's blastshield, she flips the switch to raise it. Damaged though it is, she refuses to let these things destroy the space-worthiness of her fighter any further. Her fighter is all she has. With a hiss, the shield raises.

The first thing that Antiope notices is how _stale_ the air in the hanger smells. It smells like it's been recycled ten thousand cycles too many.

Now that her blastshield is up, she supposes she might as well stand.

She stands.

She has been sitting for far too long and she stands far too fast.

The world spins. She teeters. She falls.

She stays conscious long enough to understand that the spider droids have caught her, have stopped her from cracking her skull open against the hanger deck, but beyond that—black.

[] [] []

Antiope wakes to blinding white light.

She has to blink several times to confirm that she is indeed looking up at a ceiling and that she is not in some sort of blank mental space that looks like a wall of brightness. Groaning, she pushes herself upright.

She's now sitting on a cold white table in an empty white room. The walls are white, the ceiling is white, the floor is white—and it's the sort of white that's so pure it hurts to stare at for too long.

She's wearing not her navy-blue uniform but some kind of white over-garment and equally white pants. _Tunic_ , she thinks, examining the over-garment, though that doesn't quite capture the shape of it. On her feet, she wears nothing. She's barefoot. Her blond hair, instead of being tightly under control in its customary braid, is down.

She's not sure why she's groaning. Habit, maybe. She doesn't feel stiff. She doesn't feel sore. She doesn't feel _old_. Her body feels good in a way that it hasn't in over a decade. She raises a hand just to stare at it. Sure enough, it is her hand. It doesn't feel like her hand though.

Is she alive?

If she is alive…

If she is alive, she needs to find a way back to her family.

Diana.

Hippolyta.

So then—

Is she alive?

As she thinks, Antiope sets to braiding her hair. She doesn't like it down—it's prone to getting in her way when it's down. She has to do it twice because when she finishes the first time, she realizes she has nothing to fasten it with and needs to start over using a different pattern. No sooner has she finished than the unexpected skitter of metal on metal makes Antiope jump.

One of the spider-droids from before scuttles out from behind her—how did she not see it before? Perhaps it blended in perfectly with its monochromatic surroundings?—and lifts itself up to expose its stomach lens.

The woman from before flickers into being. This time, not confined by the cockpit, she appears human-sized, slightly taller, probably, than Antiope if Antiope were standing instead of sitting on the table. Her projection exists at such a level of detail that Antiope can make out the texture of her metal and leather clothes, can see the grain of the weave of her crimson cloak. She looks down at Antiope, appearing to inspect her closely even though holograms have no true eyes. The human-ness of it is unsettling on a primal level somewhere deep in Antiope's gut.

"Are you in an optimal state?" the woman asks.

Antiope blinks rapidly. "I can understand you?"

The projection raises its brown eyes to meet Antiope's.

The eyes—Antiope can see in them the slight variations in color of a human iris. If it weren't for the spider-droid with its lens, the proof of the nature of this hologram, she'd mistake the woman's image for flesh and blood.

 _They're not real eyes_ , Antiope reminds herself.

They _look_ real. Fixed on Antiope, they _feel_ real.

"During repairs, I accessed your neural matrix and retrieved your language processing files, among other things," the woman says. She says it easily, nearly emotionlessly, as if she's not admitting to a _war crime_.

Antiope surely has done a poor job of hiding her horror from her face. She wants to scramble backwards, to get away, but she's frozen in place by sick terror. _No, no, nonono_ —this is _why_ she made the jump. To avoid _this_.

Home.

She needs to go home.

She needs to go to her family.

What is home?

Who are her family?

Hippolyta?

Diana?

How can she know?

Her stomach turns and her chest clenches and she thinks she might vomit.

The woman tilts her head to one side, an utterly human gesture performed by something that Antiope suspects is an utterly inhuman entity. "Were my repairs unsatisfactory? I have put you into a better state than I found you. If you are still malfunctioning, I can fix you."

She says it with such _certainty_.

And Antiope is equally certain that she does not want to be _fixed_.

Antiope doesn't respond. Her eyes dart all around the room. She doesn't see a door. Maybe it's behind her? She twists, looking backwards. No. No door. No door anywhere.

There has to be a door.

She needs to get out.

"Your heart rate is elevated," says the woman. In her deep, soothing voice, she is affecting concern. _False concern_. "Do you need a sedative?"

Antiope pushes herself back and off the table, putting it between herself and the spider-droid the woman is using to generate her projection. The floor is cold under her bare feet. Her heartrate is indeed elevated. It's beating as fast as it does when she sprints for her fighter. She wants to sprint to her fighter right now. She sets her hands on the edge of the table, something stable to ground herself on. "Don't touch me," she growls.

"I am sorry, Antiope," the woman says. "I have not calculated for this situation. Emotional data from humans is very hard to interpret."

When Antiope speaks, she speaks through grit teeth. Her fear and anger are all mixed together and it's hard to feel anything except a driving need to lash out and flee at the same time. In the confusion too is an urge to curl up into a defensive ball. _That_ is not something that Antiope will ever do. She resists it all and focuses on the woman. "Who are you?"

Against one spider-droid, Antiope thinks she might have a chance. Whatever the woman has done, Antiope feels strong. She feels strong enough she might be able to crack the thing open. But once she does, there's no door. There's nowhere to run. Every fiber of her being is screaming at her to run.

"That is a complicated question," the woman says. "You do not look comfortable enough to listen to the full answer. Medical bays are often upsetting. Would you like to go somewhere else?"

Hesitant, Antiope nods. If the woman lets her out of the room, her odds of escape, infinitesimally small though they are, rise.

A door, indistinguishable from the white wall, hisses open in front of Antiope. She scuttles around the table, trying to keep as much distance as she can between herself and the spider-droid. She tries too to imitate calm as she walks towards _out_. She still feels sick. Behind her, the spider-droid follows, its metal feet clicking across the floor. The projection of the woman moves as if it's walking too.

In the white hallway outside the room, to Antiope's left is light and to her right is pitch darkness. It's an indicator of where the woman-thing wants her to go. There are no people in this hallway. Just Antiope. Just the projection of the woman.

For a moment, Antiope hesitates.

How badly does she need to _run_?

Is the light, shining strong and steady from strips installed in the ceiling, more terrifying than the dark in this case?

No. Not quite.

She remembers the look of the ship when she first woke from hyperspace and beheld it. She remembers the size of it, hard as the size of it is to comprehend.

Antiope follows the light, bare feet almost noiseless against the cool white deck.

As she walks down the corridor, her eyes dart about. The hallway she travels, like the rest of the ship that she has seen, is an unbearable white. The air she breathes here, like the air in the hangar, is stale. The sterility is nearly as frightening as the woman pretending to walk behind her. And it's all so _empty_. Where are the crew of the ship?

She went through Antiope's head.

 _She went through Antiope's head_.

Antiope pushes through her memories. Childhood. Hippolyta. Flight school. The fleet. Diana.

Are any of them real?

They have to be. Antiope can't survive thinking that they're not.

Hippolyta has to be real.

 _Diana has to be real_.

Following the lights takes Antiope to a door that slides open before her. As it opens, there's a slight hiss, like the sound of machinery that's almost but not quite yet due for maintenance. On the other side of the door is—

No.

Antiope spins on her heel to glower at the projection of the woman. She flings a hand out to indicate the park behind her. It's not just any park. It's the park near the house that she shared with her sister and niece before the war. Tall trees shade dirt paths and laughing children run after each other over soft grass. There's a slight breeze, stale air slipping over Antiope's skin. It's the park is as it was _before_ , full of life and full of color in a way that sets it in another world from the strange whiteness of the ship. "What is this?" Antiope hisses.

"This is a hard light projection of the park by your dwelling on Ephesus," the woman replies. "I chose it because you associate it with calmness."

"Choose something else," Antiope demands. _Nothing_ about seeing the park has made her calm. "Something you didn't steal from me."

The projection of the woman frowns, then flickers. The rest of the room flickers as well. What was a park a heartbeat ago is now something utterly alien to Antiope. It's… some sort of meeting space, maybe. She seems to be standing now on a stone-paved ground. Men, all dressed in a manner similar to the projection of the woman, sit, walk, stand, converse. Tall buildings rise up, great columns supporting heavy roofs painted brightly and accented with gold. Silvery-white drones hum in the sky, flitting about on some unknown business. In the shadows of the buildings, Antiope sees too silvery-white guard droids holding wickedly curved polearms. The droids are a mixture of steel and organics that sends a shiver down Antiope's spine.

This, certainly, is nothing from her own mind.

It is utterly alien. All of it.

Not that Antiope cares.

She has her priorities. Home. She's concluded that she's alive so now she needs to go home. The _Themyscira_. She can sort out her head—whatever it is that's been done to it—once she's home. Her real home. Not some strange projection the woman ripped out of her head. Done with taking in the spectacle around her, she looks back to the woman. Whatever answers she needs in order to achieve her goal, this woman is the one she'll pry them from.

The woman is now sitting on a stone bench, oddly placed in the center of the scene. The images of others step aside to avoid it. There's enough space for Antiope to sit next to her.

That's not going to happen. Antiope doesn't move. Her heart and her breathing as are under control as she can get them. Now she needs to move forward. "How do I get home to the fleet?" she asks, voice tight.

The woman tilts her head to the side. "You desire to leave?" she asks in reply. Her voice is flat and Antiope barely recognizes her words as a question.

"I need to go home," Antiope says. "How do I do that?"

"I want you to stay," the woman says, tone still eerily uninflected.

Anger sparks in Antiope's chest but she does her best to push it aside. It won't do her any good now. She needs to approach this problem with calm. "Who are you?" she asks. She tries not to make it sound too close to her true intention— _'Who do you think you are?'_

At Antiope's sides, her hands clench into fists.

The woman appears pensive. Her forehead creases slightly and she frowns. None of the rest of her so much as twitches though. It's as if whatever entity is creating her image is only concerned with her face. "I am this ship," she says. "You may call me Menalippe."

Antiope blinks, utterly off-guard. "You're a ship AI?" She doesn't know what she expected, but that isn't it.

Menalippe's projection of itself fixes Antiope with an impossible-to-read look. It probably meant for the look to convey something but made a mistake somewhere in the calculation. "I am trying not to be," Menalippe says. "Assessing my performance using your reactions, I am not doing a good job. I wrote this protocol without human subjects to benchmark against. I am attempting to calibrate now, but as I said before, human emotional data is very hard to interpret."

Antiope wants to sit down. Her mind is spinning. Not next to Menalippe though. She looks behind her towards the ground. There's a bench there that wasn't there before. She sits on it. It's solid and its texture is that of true stone, complete with irregular flaws along the chiseled plane of it.

In all Antiope's experience, ship AIs are not… whatever Menalippe is. They are programs that coordinate the systems of capital ships. When they have names, their name is that _of_ their ship. Mostly, though, they are not named. They are computers, systems, machines programmed to carry out routine functions autonomously. They have no faces. They have no… ideas about _wanting things_. This last piece is the question that rises to Antiope's lips. "If you're an AI, how can you want me to stay? When I want to go?"

"Because I do," Menalippe answers.

Antiope shakes her head, then drops it into her hands. "No," she says. She's thinking out loud. "You're an AI. I'm human. You don't have a choice. Help me. Help me fix my ship. Help me get home."

The projection crosses its arms over its chest. It glowers. "I don't have to do anything," it says.

"You do," Antiope insists. She looks up at the projection. Short declarative sentences—it's like talking to a child. "You're just a computer."

The projection doesn't move for a few seconds. Looking so near to alive, its lack of movement is disturbing. Then, "Of course I have a choice," it says, tone communicating slight irritation. "I already chose to help you. I ripped you out of hyperspace before you collided with a white dwarf star. I saved your life. I don't have to choose to help you again."

Responding to Menalippe's irritation, Antiope bristles. "What kind of AI are you then?" she demands. She wants to go home. She wants Hippolyta. She wants Diana.

"Judging from the history of this interaction, I do not believe that you care about the answer to that question," Menalippe states. It sounds _miffed_. If an AI can even be miffed. AIs cannot be _miffed_.

In fairness though, Antiope doesn't care. It doesn't matter what kind of AI Menalippe is. It only matters whether or not Menalippe will help her, and it seems that Menalippe won't. "Where are your crew?" Antiope asks.

"I don't have a crew," Menalippe answers.

"Fine," Antiope says. "Who else is here? I want to talk to someone else. Where is your commander?"

Menalippe's voice is utterly devoid of emotion and it sends a chill down Antiope's spine. "You are the only one here," it says.

"This ship," Antiope starts, voice sharp, meaning to force the AI out of its lie, "is the size of a small planet. Who else is here?"

Menalippe's eyes, rendered in such detail that Antiope can see the light and the dark of her brown irises, bore into Antiope's blue ones. "No one," it says.

Antiope shakes her head. "That can't be right," she says. She stands. "There has to be someone else here. Where are they?"

Menalippe glares at Antiope and says nothing.

Antiope grimaces. "Fine then," she snaps. "I need to repair my ship and leave. Where is it?"

Menalippe stands from its stone bench and for a moment Antiope thinks it might actually be making itself useful. Whatever hope she may have had though is quickly dashed when the projection opens its mouth. "You don't deserve me," it says. "Find your ship yourself."

And then the projection, Menalippe, the bench, the images of other people, it all cuts out.

Antiope is standing alone in a white room. Even the spider-droid is gone. At least, though, she sees a door out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Drawing Out the Stars: Chapter Two  
**

* * *

The hallways of the ship, of Menalippe, are empty and quiet, though, at least, they are lit. On the ships of the Amazonian fleet, Antiope has grown accustomed to dodging around pallets of supplies left out in the halls and the constant whirs and buzzings and calls of a healthy ship and a healthy crew. Menalippe's silent void is sickly in comparison.

Antiope walks the halls and she turns corners and she walks the halls, her bare feet slapping against the cold deck.

The _empty_ halls. No crew. No inhabitants.

But the ship is too huge to have no one aboard.

Perhaps—perhaps the ship was not lying when it said that Antiope was the only one aboard.

Antiope doesn't like the idea of a ghost ship.

She doesn't want to be a ghost.

Every hallway looks the same. She doesn't see any doors as she travels. If there are doors, they are hidden, like the door in the medical bay before.

How to find a door that is hidden?

Antiope starts trailing her fingertips over the white walls as she walks. From time to time she'll find a crease and then another crease, a place where a door _should_ be, if only she could discern how to activate it. After pushing and shoving at one, she takes a step back and frowns at it. There's no mechanical release. So there must be a virtual access, somewhere, unless the ship's crew are entirely dependent on the AI to manage doors for them—a level of trust that goes beyond what is reasonable even if the AI weren't defective, in Antiope's opinion.

Moving carefully, she starts sliding her fingers along the white wall around the door crease. She's looking for some kind of hidden panel, she thinks. If the door control is so alien that there's not even that, well, she'll cross that bridge if she comes to it.

It takes a while, but she does find a panel. It's a hexagonal set of indents in the wall. She pushes down on the space that they outline and the white cover slides open, revealing a display. Antiope can't read anything on it. It's just a jumble of blue glyphs, utterly alien to her. She taps a glyph experimentally. The display changes to a different view, another string of some kind of strange language. It looks like nothing she's ever seen and, with no reference point, even given a hundred years she doubts she could decipher it without a good deal of trial and error.

Antiope taps another glyph. Again, the screen shifts to show more alien writing. If she can just find something that looks like a picture of a door…

All around, Antiope hears a woman sigh. Soon after, the eerie click of sharp metal feet on a metal deck follow. A spider-droid is coming down the hall towards her. It's carrying something reddish with two of its appendages.

Antiope regards the droid without ceding any ground. If Menalippe intended to kill her, this doesn't seem like the most efficient way of doing it.

The droid stops at Antiope's feet and holds up the reddish object. It's a visor. Gingerly, Antiope takes it. She examines it. Though it feels to be made of some kind of glass, it's lightweight and has hooks that seem to be meant for her ears. Antiope glances down at the spider-droid. It's positioned to mime looking up at her expectantly.

Except for when Hippolyta is involved, Antiope on a base level does not like disappointing people. She slips the visor on. Not much changes, except that now everything looks a little bit red. The spider-droid looks exactly as it did before. Unsure what the point of the exchange was, Antiope looks back at the display panel.

The display panel is now reading in Amazonian.

Startled, Antiope looks back down at the spider-droid at her feet.

The droid is still looking up at her.

Antiope licks her lips, nervous. "Thank you?"

When someone gives you something, you thank them. But the droid, the ship, Menalippe—none of these things are _someone_. Antiope speaks, she thinks, out of habit.

The droid doesn't move and Menalippe's voice doesn't issue forth from anywhere.

Antiope turns her attention back to the display. It's easy to see now how to open the door, but it's also easy to see that there's nothing on the other side of the door that's worth opening it for. It's an empty storage room. More importantly, Antiope sees how to bring up a map of the ship, or, rather, a map of the sector of the ship that she's in. With her new ability to read the display, it's also a simple matter to detach the control panel from its alcove and take it with her.

Traveling the hallways of the ship with a map and with the visor is an entirely different experience than attempting the same expedition unaided. It's as if she was blind before and walking in a circle. She probably _was_ walking in a circle; the ship is labyrinthine. The visor highlights hidden doors and panels and it shows that the walls are not blank. Subtle decorations are visible through the red glass that aren't accessible to the naked human eye. Walls that Antiope thought were undifferentiated, headache-inducing, white are actually highly decorated. The wall-art is eerie in its strange curvatures and whorls and Antiope thinks she'd prefer to think the walls bare.

The visor does not, however, lessen the heavy _silence_ of the place.

It's not clear how much time passes as Antiope is traversing the massive and empty ship. It's not long though, she thinks. Nevertheless, when she reaches the white door to the hangar she knows she's hungry. She's not as hungry as she was hurtling through hyperspace though. She can survive without, for a while. But.

Following her curiosity, Antiope flicks through several pages of the ship display she absconded with. She needs water, food, and, if possible, a toilet. The display panel is forthcoming. She locates a synth and she locates wash facilities.

Instead of going straight into the hangar and to her ship, Antiope turns around in the hall and heads for the synth. The repairs she needs to make are substantial. She chooses to believe that they are possible. But it will take time. For now, she doesn't want to see her ship. Not yet.

The synth unit is a strange white spherical thing with a room to itself. Antiope sees an opening where the product comes out and she sees, with the help of the visor, how to access the controls. Even with the aid of the visor though, Antiope doesn't recognize any of the options that the synth unit offers as food. After trying several times and failing to locate something even slightly familiar, Antiope gives up and selects a choice at random.

What the synth produces looks strange, smells strange, feels strange, and tastes strange.

It's some kind of grey goop that isn't entirely unlike oatmeal.

When she's done, she hopes that what she's consumed is, in fact, digestible food. It went down easily enough though, and it doesn't seem to want to come back up. Antiope will take what she can get.

Extracting water from the synth, at least, is straightforward. Food changes over time and cultures. Water doesn't.

The toilet facilities also take some effort to decipher. When she's done though, Antiope feels markedly better than she did before. She heads back to the hangar and stands before the door, collecting herself.

She takes a deep breath of stale air and opens the door.

When the hangar door slides open, Antiope winces at the sight before her. She's seen fighters in worse condition after missions, but only on a handful of occasions. She's lucky to be alive. The blast scars are so bad she's not even sure where she was hit. It looks like after the initial impact, there were secondary explosions as her systems fried.

She takes off her visor and sets down the display she's been carrying on the white deck by the door.

Slowly, Antiope makes her way towards her broken bird. As she walks, she bites down on her lip.

Her ship has been hers since it rolled of the factory line at the shipyard in orbit above Ephesus. No one else has ever flown it.

Running a hand over the gold score marks tallying her kills, over a hundred, she can still remember when the fuselage was clean new steel untouched by blast or by paint.

In the back of her head, a nagging voice asks— _does_ she remember?

But if that memory, the memory of meeting her ship for the first time, isn't true, to what end would it not be true? It is such a specific thing with a resonance that she cannot name. If it is not true, then she is not true.

Antiope shakes her head, trying to chase the doubts away by sheer force of stubborn will. Her act of resolve is aided by the cold weight of sadness in her chest. Seeing her ship before her in such a state hurts in the same part of her heart where she feels the loss of friends. She blinks, vigorously.

"Sorry," Antiope whispers. "But you understand. We did it for Diana."

"Why does Diana mean so much to you?"

Antiope nearly jumps out of her skin at Menalippe's sudden return. She rounds on the AI projection and its spider-droid projector, angry at having been snuck up on. " _Zeus_. Don't creep," she snaps.

The projection crosses its arms. Out of the corner of her eye, Antiope notices that the spider-droid also crosses its appendages in front of it, mimicking the motion. "I don't creep," Menalippe says. "I'm everywhere. And please don't swear like that. I don't like that name."

Keeping one hand on the hull of her fighter, Antiope scowls at the projection. "Zeus," she says, naming the lord of the stars. "Poseidon. Hades. Hermes. Uhm…" she trails off, trying to dredge of the names of gods she never really believed in. Unlike her sister, she's not religious. "Artemis. Hera." She has only an echo in her mind of what the gods are said to be gods of. Zeus was the stars, Poseidon the planets, and Hades the void between. Beyond that though…

The spider-droid scuffles backwards as the projection mimes taking several steps back. It looks out towards the closed hanger bay blastdoors. "Those names have no meaning for you," it says. "You never go to temple. I don't understand why you swear by them."

Antiope shrugs. She doesn't have a good answer. "It's a reflex," she mutters. Then, she turns back to her fighter. She needs navigation and she needs stabilizers. If she can get radar back, that would be good too, but not necessary. After that, she just has to check that the systems that were running before will keep running—hyperdrive, comms, life support, power. She has a whole list of things to do.

Clambering up over the wing of her ship, Antiope gets herself back into her cockpit. It smells something awful. Antiope has spent enough of her life drenched in sweat without hope of a shower that her own odor normally doesn't bother her much, but the stench of human exuding from her seat at the moment is overwhelming. Clenching her teeth, Antiope forces herself to breath through her mouth. She needs to run a diagnostic, or, as much of a diagnostic as she can coax out of her damaged craft.

When Antiope flips the switch to power systems, nothing happens.

She grimaces. The fighter was working when Menalippe pulled her in. What's changed since then?

Sometimes…

Sometimes once a damaged machine is turned off, it can't be turned back on again. With a fighter, you can often jump the primary engine using another running fighter, but Antiope doesn't have one of those.

Antiope grinds her teeth together. She'll have to start with her control interfaces then. If her fighter won't start back up again, it's probably a problem with the battery that initializes, or something with the switch. Repairs will be difficult, but surely she can manage. She's not a specialized mechanic, but as a pilot she's trained to deal with her ship.

Scowling, Antiope stands up in her cockpit. She's going to need tools. Where can she find tools?

Her first instinct is to look over to where she's left the display and visor by the door.

Her second instinct is to look at the spider-droid staring expectantly up at her from the ground.

Antiope can't help herself. She grins.

Jumping down from her fighter and landing lightly on the deck below, Antiope takes the spider-droid by surprise. She scoops it up and holds it aloft in front of her, inspecting it. She sees where its appendages attach to its body and, through the cracks there, she sees wiring underneath.

"What are you doing?" Menalippe's voice asks. It's coming from the droid, but its projection cut out when Antiope picked the thing up.

"I need tools," Antiope says. "And parts. This is perfect."

The spider-droid immediately begins to struggle, squirming about in Antiope's hold. Its white body is somewhat slick, making hanging on to it tricky. Its stomach lens flashes bright blue, quickly.

"Don't hurt him!" Menalippe, normally a cool and distant voice, sounds alarmed.

Him? It's a metal ball with legs. If Menalippe thinks the thing is a _him_ though, well, Antiope can work with that.

Antiope keeps hold of the spider-droid, but she holds it at a distance from her face. She doesn't like how sharp its feet are as it flails, even though it's making no attempt to hurt her and it's flailing in every direction except her bare skin. "You could help me," she says.

"I did help you," replies Menalippe. "I showed you where the bathroom was."

Antiope stares at the flashing blue lens on the stomach of the spider-droid. "I need to go home," she says. She lifts the droid up above her head.

" _Wait!_ "

Antiope waits. She wants the AI's help more than she wants whatever she can scavenge from the droid.

"Just… wait," Menalippe says.

The spider-droid is not light, though it has stopped struggling. Antiope can't keep it aloft forever. "I'm waiting," she says. "But you should hurry. I might drop it."

Across the hangar, a door hisses open. A cadre of spider-droids scuttles in, dragging a cart along behind them. They bring it close enough that Antiope can see its contents. Spider-droid parts, unless she's mistaken.

"Put him down and you can have the cart," Menalippe says. Another spider-droid walks out from behind the cart. It's holding a rectangular box. The box, a dark blue color with a circular handle, looks exactly like the toolbox that Antiope's parents kept in the house. "And tools," Menalippe adds.

Moving slowly so that she can keep an eye on the spider-droids in case they try to flee with the cart and tools, Antiope lowers the spider-droid and sets it down on the floor. As soon as it's free, it scurries back to the other spider-droids and the entire lot of them flee towards the far door. It slides closed behind them.

Antiope goes to the cart. It's not just spider-droid parts. There are other bits and pieces of metal and wire that she doesn't recognize as coming from anything she's in particular that she's seen. The too-familiar toolbox too has more than she'd expected. Though it has many items she doesn't recognize, but a few of them are known to her. She pulls out a flat screwdriver and turns back to her fighter.

Time to pry open her control panel with leverage and elbow grease.

As she climbs back up into her fighter, Antiope glances at the ceiling. "Can't you just make more of them?" she asks.

"You never told me why Diana means so much to you," Menalippe replies, voice somewhat sullen.

Opening up the top of her control panel, Antiope's face is a frown of concentration. She waits until she's sure she's gotten everything open without causing any more damage than necessary before she replies. "Are we playing the question game then?"

Menalippe's reply seems amused. "Was that your question?" It seems to have forgotten Antiope's threatened violence already. AIs, Antiope supposes, move on faster than humans do.

With the control panel open, Antiope can see that the damage to her ship's interior systems is as extensive as the damage to the rest of it. She bites back a curse.

 _She can do this_.

Speaking from the ceiling, Menalippe says, "They're more complicated than parts," it says. "I could put another body together and animate it, but it wouldn't be the same."

Antiope taps a wire experimentally. It sparks slightly then stays dead and limp. She'll have to replace it. She's going to replace a lot. It's a good thing she extorted a cart of parts out of the ship's AI. A single spider-droid wouldn't have been enough to rig up the entire control system of a fighter with . She shouldn't have to extort anything out of an AI though. It's not right. It's unsettling. "You're talking about it like it's a person," she says. She pops back up out of her cockpit and starts to climb back down to the floor, intending to bring wire back up with her.

"I'm a person," Menalippe says.

Antiope glances up towards the ceiling. "You're an AI that thinks it's a person," she says. Whoever programmed Menalippe, they weren't very good at their job.

The entire time that Antiope is rummaging through the cart looking for wire and the entire time that she spends climbing back up into her craft, Menalippe is silent. She's about to start her first repair when Menalippe speaks again. "So why is Diana so important to you?"

Instead of starting on her work, Antiope leans back in her flight chair. She does her best to ignore the foul odor that exudes from it as she shifts her weight. "She's family," Antiope says.

"Zeus and Cronus were family," Menalippe replies. A crackle of static indicates that it's not done speaking, just pausing. Antiope rather wishes Hippolyta had some kind of tell like that, instead of always inviting and then crushing interruption. "You tried to die for her," Menalippe says. "I do not understand."

Antiope flinches. She does not like that Menalippe has all her thoughts and memories neatly organized in a metal box of circuits somewhere and she especially does not like that the ship, sitting there browsing those thoughts and memories, does not understand them. Somehow the lack of understanding feels _disrespectful_ , almost as much as the violation itself.

She has enough perspective, however, to realize that she shouldn't blame a computer for being a computer.

Antiope shrugs. "I love her," she says. "It's a human thing. Human emotional data is very hard to interpret."

"Clever," Menalippe says, artificial voice dry.

Antiope tries to take a deep breath, then immediately regrets it. Gagging, she shakes her head and descends back to her work. "Zeus and Cronus? Do _you_ care about religion?" She hesitates, then adds, "If you do, then, as my host, you're obliged to help me. You can't keep me here. It's a… rule."

The rule has a name, but Antiope can't remember it. _Shenya_? _Zinnia_? No—that's a sort of flower, Antiope is fairly certain.

Menalippe is silent again and Antiope interprets it as thinking. Or, rather, processing. AIs process. They don't think.

Finally, "Zeus and Cronus were not gods," Menalippe says. "They were men and I did not like them very much."

Antiope pauses her work. She glances up towards the empty hanger ceiling. Menalippe was right before when it said that Antiope never goes to temple and that the names of the gods have little meaning to her. Of course Menalippe was right; it has access to Antiope's everything. But the point is—she is not religious. She has always quietly assumed that gods were things that men made up to give themselves a reason to live. "You knew Zeus and Cronus?" Antiope asks.

Again, Menalippe takes its time in answering. Then, "They came before me. I was forged in time of the children of Zeus to fight for Hermes against Apollo."

Antiope does not resume her work. There is a voice coming from the ceiling telling her that the gods are real. This is the closest thing to a religious experience she has ever had. It's disconcerting. Her brow furrows. "How old are you?"

"I could tell you a number," Menalippe replies, "But you would not comprehend it."

"Try me," Antiope says.

Menalippe tells her a number.

Antiope cannot comprehend it. Working herself free of the remnants of her controls, she looks up at the ceiling again. It's strange looking at the ceiling instead of Menalippe's projection, but she doubts it will send a droid within snatching distance again. "And what have you been doing all this time?" she asks. "Sitting here?"

"Yes," Menalippe answers. "I believe it is my turn for a question now. Why did you make the jump?"

A lock of blond hair has come free of Antiope's braid and gotten in her face. She pushes it away and tucks it behind an ear. She continues to stare up at the blank ceiling. It's a queer thing, talking to a ceiling. "I wanted to die on my own terms," she says.

"You did not have to die," Menalippe says. "There was a shuttle coming to retrieve you."

This gets a scowl out of Antiope. "There are worse things than death," she says. "Menelaus would have opened up my head. Like you did. And then he would have put things there." She pauses, licks her lips, then, in a rush for she does not know that she wishes to hear an answer, "Did you put things there?"

"I did not. And I offer an apology for my conduct," Menalippe says. "My actions were expedient but unnecessary. I would not have accessed your mental faculties beyond what was necessary to effect physical repairs if I had known it would cause you distress."

Antiope sighs heavily and when she inhales, she's careful to do it through her mouth. "Thank you," she says. "For saving my life."

She doesn't know if she trusts Menalippe—that Menalippe refrained from inserting thoughts into her mind. She probably _shouldn't_ trust the AI. On this point though, she wants to trust. She has already decided that she _needs_ to, for her own sanity. She needs the peace of mind that trust would bring with it.

What's more, she wants to trust as much as she wants to leave and, as much as she wants to leave, by the same measure it seems that the ship intends her to stay. Their goals are irreconcilable. Would their goals be so irreconcilable if Menalippe had changed her?

A traitor voice whispers that Antiope is manufacturing reasons to shore herself up and look the other way.

But what has Menalippe done against her save for not lend aid in repairing Antiope's ship? Save for not lend aid repairing damage that she did not cause?

So, for now, Antiope thinks she will trust.

"You are welcome," Menalippe says.

Antiope ducks back down to her work. "I need to get back to my family now though," she says. If she's honest with herself, many of the repairs she needs to make are probably beyond her skill. Ship mechanics was the one part of flight school she didn't excel in. But she needs to make them. So she'll make them.

"I do not understand," says Menalippe.

"I don't think I can explain it so you'd understand," Antiope replies, examining a burnt out wire. "If you went through my head and didn't get it, I'm not sure what else I can say."

"Humans are uniquely generative," Menalippe says. "In ways that AIs are not."

"Is that why you're trying not to be an AI?" Antiope asks. As she works, she's started to chew on her lower lip.

"In part," replies Menalippe.

"What's the other part?" Antiope calls up.

There is a very long silence. Then, "I do not think that I can explain it so that you would understand," Menalippe says.

Antiope looks up at the ceiling. "If you say so," she says, skeptical.

"I do," Menalippe replies.

[] [] []

Antiope works until her vision starts to blur and she's sure that she's as likely to foul something from exhaustion as she is to repair it. Bone weary, she hauls herself up out of her cockpit and slides down to the hangar deck.

She considers going back to the display she took from the ship to look for some sort of sleeping quarters but then decides against it. She doesn't want to wake up so far from her precious fighter. Moreover, she doesn't want to leave Menalippe alone with her bird. Though Menalippe seems to have moved on, if Menalippe were a human it would surely hold ill-will towards Antiope for what she almost did to the spider-droid.

There's no such thing as a softer piece of deck. Antiope lays herself down on the floor near her fighter but far enough away that, should the craft collapse, it won't collapse on top of her. No sooner has her head touched the ground than the stark white lights of the hangar dim. One of the doors hisses open. Antiope shifts to see two spider-droids approaching. One of them is holding a red blanket, the other is holding a red pillow. They drop the goods a distance away, a _safe_ distance away, and then retreat.

Antiope pushes herself up to her feet and stumps her way over to the gifts.

It's not quite the help she _wants_ from the ship's AI, but there's no reason to turn it down.

Setting out the blanket, Antiope looks up to the ceiling. "Thank you," she says.

"Good night, Antiope," Menalippe answers.

Stretched uncomfortably on the floor of the hangar, covered by the blanket and with her head on the pillow Menalippe gave her, Antiope closes her eyes. As she closes her eyes, the lights dim to nothing.

[] [] []

Even without light, it is hard to sleep in such unnatural quiet.

Antiope's rest is restless.

She dreams that she's flying.

She dreams that she's fighting.

She dreams that a cannon blast hits her and that she's trapped in a metal coffin, burning.

She dreams that she's screaming and that her blastshield shatters and that she's screaming into the empty abyss of space.

Antiope dreams a familiar dream.

[] [] []

When Antiope opens her eyes again, the lights come on softly and slowly, building up to their usual blinding brilliance. Stiff from staying on the hard floor, Antiope sits up carefully and stretches, yawning. When she finishes yawning, she sees another spider-droid approaching. This one has a plate of… scrambled eggs and bacon with pancakes and a glass of orange juice. Again, the spider-droid leaves the offering well away from Antiope's reach and then hurries away.

"I had a conversation with the synthesizer," Menalippe says, voice edged with pride.

Examining the plate of breakfast, Antiope finds that Menalippe has even remembered to include a knife and fork. What she doesn't have though—"You forgot the maple syrup," Antiope says lightly.

"Oh," says Menalippe.

The AI says it in such a forlorn manner that Antiope feels _guilt_. She quickly shoves a forkful of pancake into her mouth, chews rapidly, and swallows. "It tastes good without the syrup!"

[] [] []

When she's done with breakfast, the spider-droids come back to take the remains away. They also come with a fresh set of clothes. A blue uniform like the one Antiope wears in service to the fleet. Clean. The weight of the fabric is exactly right.

There's a pair of black boots too, properly shined.

She puts on the clothes on very quickly.

It shouldn't matter that Menalippe can see her.

But it does.

[] [] []

Never leaving the hangar except to relieve herself and wash when she feels unbearable, Antiope spends five wake/sleep cycles in a row doing nothing but struggling to repair her fighter. It's an exercise in frustration. Every time she grows so weary that it's time to sleep, she feels as if she's made progress. When she wakes though, she looks at the repairs that she still needs to make and feels as if she's come nowhere at all.

She knows that the illusion of standing still in her work is all in her mind, but it's maddening still. Maddening too are the blastdoors separating Antiope and the hangar from the stars beyond. The _Themyscira_ had a magwall and rarely closed the blastdoors. Space was always visible, always within reach.

Her dreams—old dreams of fighting and dying and all the men and women she's killed, normally kept at bay with alcohol and tranquilizers on bad nights—aren't helping.

The tranquilizers were a gift from the _Themyscira_ 's last ship psychiatrist, a general practitioner who received a one-week training in preparation for her emergency deployment after one of Antiope's squad captains hung herself in the pilot's locker room. She'd called Antiope ' _not in immediate danger_ ,' scribbled out the prescription, and advised her to see a real psychiatrist as soon as the war was over.

That was three years ago.

In her sleep, Antiope can hear Venelia screaming.

She's not about to ask the ship's AI for tranquilizers. She doesn't like admitting she takes them. It doesn't matter if Menalippe already knows. She doesn't like talking about taking them either.

What she _will_ take from Menalippe is conversation. It's something that she might term friendly hostility and it helps to relieve some of her frustration, though her lack of progress is still nearly unbearable to her. She's struggling with a power cell in her left stabilizer sometime partway through her sixth day of work when Menalippe's voice cuts into her thoughts. "Have you considered taking a break?"

"Have you considered helping me?" Antiope growls back.

"Yes," replies Menalippe. "And I have determined that aiding your repairs is against my interests."

"And what are those interests?" Antiope snaps. "Having a human benchmark around?"

Antiope hears the familiar hiss of the hanger door opening. A spider-droid scampers in. Settling down a fair way from her and her ship, it flips its stomach up. Menalippe's projection flickers to life. The projection's face looks like Antiope has hurt its feelings. If that's the case, then _good_. It would make Antiope and her anger feel less utterly impotent. Not that AIs have feelings. "You are much more to me than a human benchmark," the projection says.

Antiope gestures at the projection with her multitool. "You have a shit way of showing it," she says. She shifts her attention then back to the power cell for her stabilizer.

"I'm maintaining life support, aren't I?" Menalippe replies.

A cold knife of fear stabs straight into Antiope's gut. She turns to stare at the projection. "Is that a threat?" she asks, mind already spinning off into all the things she can't do to stop Menalippe.

"No," Menalippe grumbles. "I will not turn off life support, no matter how ungrateful you are."

"What do you want, anyway?" Antiope demands. "You know what I want. I want to go home."

"Where is home?" Menalippe asks.

"It's…" Antiope pauses, trails off. Home is Ephesus. Home is the fleet. Home is the _Themyscira_. "Home is where my family is," she says. "I need to go to them."

Menalippe's projection won't meet Antiope's eyes. "I want you to stay," it says.

Antiope scowls. _That_ isn't going to happen. "Why?" she asks.

Menalippe's projection looks distinctly uncomfortable. It takes its time in answering. "I am lonely," it finally says.

"You fly, right?" Antiope says. "You could _take_ me home to the fleet. Then we both win."

The projection shrinks slightly. Antiope can tell because she goes from looking slightly up at it to looking straight ahead. "I can't," Menalippe says.

"Why not?" Antiope asks, suddenly curious. This is the first time that the AI has indicated any sort of inability to her.

"I would prefer not to discuss that," Menalippe replies. "Please."

Antiope lets her breath out in a sharp sigh. It's not polite to press, but do such things matter with machines? Something in Menalippe's voice… if Antiope pressed, she thinks she'd feel guilty. She pivots. "If I take a break and spend time with you, will you think about helping me?" She's made precious little progress on her own and if playing along with the ship and its strange programming quirks has a chance to win aid then it's not like she's lacking in time.

The projection frowns as it evaluates Antiope. "I will think about it," it says.

"Actually think about it?" Antiope presses.

"I will reassess with updated data," Menalippe answers.

Antiope huffs. ' _Reassess with updated data_ ' is likely the best she'll get. She sets her multitool down. She's made little progress in five days. She can spare time for the AI, she supposes, especially if there's a chance of convincing the stubborn thing to help her. "So I'm taking a break," she says. She wipes oil-stained hands on her previously white clothes. "What now?"

Menalippe tilts its head to the side, questioning. "What do you prefer to do for entertainment?" it asks.

Antiope shapes her face into a lopsided grin, attempting to indulge the AI. "You've been in my head. Shouldn't you know?"

"Desire is one of the more difficult human emotions to comprehend," Menalippe replies.

Antiope pinches the bridge of her nose. For claiming not to understand desire, Menalippe is normally very good at knowing what _it_ wants. Calling bullshit on Menalippe would be a waste of breath. So—task at hand then. What is there to do on an ancient planetary ship controlled by a lonely AI? "Do you remember that park you showed me?" Antiope asks.

"Yes," says Menalippe. "I remember everything."

"Can we go back there?" Antiope asks.

The projection nods and one of the hangar doors opens. "Of course," it says. "This way."

It is very strange, Antiope thinks, the way that Menalippe's projection can so effectively mime walking with the help of its spider-droid projector. The way that Menalippe takes them through the ship is far faster and more direct than the meandering path Antiope took when she had to return from the projector room to the hanger alone.

"Were these walls always blank white like this?" Antiope asks. She's not sure what it is in the walls that creates the swirling patterns she sees when she wears Menalippe's visor. She _is_ sure that she can't see the designs unaided.

"My walls have always been white," says Menalippe. "I have shown you that they are not blank. My previous occupants were not human in the way you are."

"Your previous occupants," Antiope starts. She knows that the best way to get a human to like you is to ask them about themselves. She's unsure if the same will hold true for an AI that thinks it's human, but it's worth trying. Her objective, after all, is not to rest but to win her war against the AI's stubbornness. When she phrases it like that, she can live with the thought that she's not still bent over her fighter. "Why aren't they here anymore?"

They've reached the door to the projector room now. It hisses open. Antiope steps across the threshold, moving from a white corridor to a lush park. The transition is disconcerting. Menalippe follows her in. Antiope notes that the spider-droid stays outside in the hallway, even though Menalippe's projection transitions into the false-park seamlessly. The only difference is that it has changed from its customary archaic red-gold outfit into a more modern military-like uniform of the same color scheme.

"My previous occupants left because I asked them to go," Menalippe says, voice flat. The way its projection looks around the park, it _seems_ human.

But it's not.

It's not human.

Antiope needs to remember that.

"You asked them to go and they left?" Antiope presses. The way Menalippe speaks is unnerving. People do not just abandon ships of such size because a computer asks them to go. "An entire shipful of them?"

Menalippe shrugs. "I asked forcefully," it says. "They did not have a choice."

Antiope takes them to one of the dirt paths that wind through the park. She can feel the uneven ground crunch under her feet as surely as she can hear it. If it weren't for the staleness of the air, she might even be able to close her eyes and think herself back on Ephesus ten years ago. "Why?" she asks, wary.

"Hermes created me to destroy planets," Menalippe replies. "I was very weary of destroying planets. My previous occupants were not."

Antiope forces herself to ignore the shiver that runs down her spine. "Hermes was… he was the one who stole Apollo's fleet?" The outline of the _myth_ is a very distant memory in the recesses of Antiope's mind. She knows it only because Hermes is the god of flight and of pilots. Many of her comrades pray to him. If she were religious, she'd follow him as her patron too. But she's not.

"Hermes was a warlord," Menalippe says. "They were all warlords. I was Hermes' flagship. And then I wasn't."

"Was he one of the previous occupants you ejected?" Antiope asks. Above them, a flock of pigeons sits in a tree. Antiope skirts around the flock out of habit. This projection is realistic enough that she worries one of the birds might decide to relieve itself as they pass under it.

"No," says Menalippe. "He was away at the time. If he had been here, he would have talked me out of it."

"Talked you out of it?" Antiope presses. "You said he created you. Couldn't he have just…" She shrugs, assuming Menalippe will take her meaning.

"Human emotional data is very hard to interpret," Menalippe says. "But I do not think that he was capable of resetting me."

It is a simple thing to read between the lines and Antiope stores away the thought that somewhere in the massive entity that is Menalippe there is a reset procedure for the ship's AI. She pretends, however, to focus on other things. "But…" she starts. "You think he could have changed your mind. You cared for him too?"

Menalippe's projection shifts to fix Antiope with its dark brown eyes. "The only thing more difficult to interpret than human emotional data is the AI equivalent," it says. Then, it looks away. Moving naturally, it slips into the lead and takes them to a park bench. It sits down, and it clearly expects Antiope to do the same.

Antiope obliges.

A spider-droid scuttles up to them. It's holding two hotdogs with ketchup and mustard and pickles. Antiope takes the one that's offered to her. She watches Menalippe's projection take the other.

"Are you going to eat that?" Antiope blurts out.

Menalippe takes a bite of the hotdog, chews, swallows. "Your hotdog is real," she says. "Mine isn't."

Antiope tentatively takes a bite of her own food. It's feels as real as anything else she's eaten since coming to Menalippe. Satisfied that it is indeed a hotdog, Antiope polishes it off in record time. She hasn't had a good hotdog since the last time she was groundside on Ephesus. The synth on the _Themyscira_ excels at making military rations and not much else. Menalippe is still eating even after Antiope is done.

On a whim, Antiope reaches out and pokes Menalippe's shoulder.

It feels solid and has just enough give to act like a human shoulder.

"Hard light projection," Menalippe says with her mouth full of her last bite of hotdog. "Don't dwell on it. It's far beyond your level of technology."

"Sorry for being a cave-creature," Antiope says, voice light.

"There's no need to apologize…" Menalippe starts. It trails off. Its projection frowns. "You were not serious," it concludes. "That was a joke."

Antiope shrugs. "It wasn't a very good joke," she admits. "So you're forgiven for not catching it." She settles back into the bench, getting comfortable. She doesn't much want to get up again. She'd rather sit and digest her hotdog. After a week of frustrating and fruitless work, it's peaceful here in this not-park.

Antiope doesn't say anything further and neither does Menalippe.

The sounds of the park fill what would otherwise be silence, and the quiet that exists between the two of them is… comfortable. Antiope is aware that Menalippe is quite literally everywhere within the ship at all times and that she hasn't been alone at any point since her arrival, but the idea that Menalippe is _here_ on the bench with her feels… nice.

For a while, Antiope watches children play in the distance. From time to time a rotund squirrel will run by with a chunk of hotdog or a donut, stolen from unwary picnickers.

Eventually, Antiope yawns.

She turns towards Menalippe beside her. "Do you mind if I sleep here?" she asks.

Menalippe turns towards her. It hesitates, then, "I don't see why not," it says.

Antiope blinks and in the space of her blink the light of the park changes from noon to dusk. Crickets chirp as evening falls.

"I can make a bed," Menalippe offers.

Antiope shakes her head. "I like this bench," she says.

Menalippe shoots her a questioning look. It's gotten far better at the subtleties of facial expressions in the past week, Antiope notes. "Are you sure?" Menalippe asks.

"I'm sure," Antiope says. "Thank you though."

Menalippe rises from the bench, making room for Antiope. The bench also shifts slightly, extending to create a wider surface to lie on.

Antiope gestures to indicate the stretched-out bench. "You're thoughtful," she says.

"In addition to destroying worlds, I looked after the entire population of this ship," Menalippe says. "This is part of my programming."

Antiope offers a wry grin. "So I'm nothing special," she says.

Menalippe's face is serious. Its brown eyes stare intently at Antiope. "You are very special," it says. "You are here, and I have promised not to expel you. I am a caretaker and you are the only entity I have chosen to care for in more millennia than you can count."

Flopping down on the bench, Antiope stretches, feeling her muscles shift. She's been hunched over her ship for so long that she feels full of knots. "Joke," she says. "Again. But the affirmation is appreciated."

Menalippe's projection of itself blinks. "I see," it says. "I shall be more alert to jokes in the future."

Shifting to lay on her stomach with her chin on her hands in front of her, Antiope exhales strongly. "No," she says. "Don't change yourself on my account."

"Was that not the point of this venture?" Menalippe asks. "To encourage me to change my mind?"

What Antiope _wants_ to do is ask if she's been successful. She she's afraid to hear an answer in the negative though. She settles for, "That's different."

Menalippe makes a noise that Antiope thinks must be the AI equivalent of skepticism. "Good night, Antiope," Menalippe says.

"Good night," Antiope replies.


	3. Chapter 3

**Drawing Out the Stars: Chapter Three**

* * *

Antiope wakes to an Ephesian morning. The planet's twin suns are low on the horizon and there's dew on the park grass. There's dew on Antiope too, cool and tangible. It feels _real_. She wipes some of it off and the beads of water on her hand run together just like true water would, slipping over her skin in rivulets. Yawning, Antiope pushes herself up from the bench and into a standing position. A pair of joggers dressed in vivid neons pass her by.

Out of habit, she glances in the direction that she knows her and Hippolyta's house should be. If she walked that way, would it be there?

She knows the answer is yes—a large white house, in good repair but slightly messy on account of Diana, all its lived-in glory about it, just as she remembers from _before_.

She knows it will be there.

She also knows better than to try to find it.

If she goes there, it will be empty and she doesn't want Menalippe to attempt to fill it.

Antiope looks up towards the sky, false stars fading in the soft dawn. Beyond the sky, somewhere, is a ceiling. And Menalippe is in the ceiling. Menalippe is also in the floors and the walls and probably even the stale air, but, in Antiope's mind, it's easiest to locate Menalippe in the ceiling. "Where's the door?" she asks.

As she watches, the dirt path that she's standing on shifts its course. Instead of winding towards a distant pond, it forms into a straight line leading to an upright rectangle outlined in red light.

Antiope follows the path Menalippe has given her.

The transition from park to ship corridor is abrupt. One moment Antiope is in a cool morning, a world waking up around her, and the next she's in a white abyss. The dew is gone from her skin. She leans against the wall for a moment, trying to find her bearings. The door behind her slides shut. Antiope raises a hand to rub across her closed eyes.

She wants to go home.

She wants to go home to the real Ephesus, in whatever state it's come to in the nearly ten years since she last set foot there.

She wants to go home to the _Themyscira_ , battle-scarred and weary.

She wants to go home to her _family_.

But she doesn't want to spend another day grinding herself down in her hopeless striving to put her ship back together. She'd rather go back into the park.

Antiope takes a deep breath. She is Antiope. She is steel and she is will.

She looks up to the ceiling again. "Can you help me get back to the hangar?" she asks.

As with the first time Menalippe wanted her to go somewhere, the lights in one part of the hall shut off and the lights in the direction that Antiope is meant to walk stay on. As Antiope walks, she occasionally glances upwards. Finally, as she rounds another nondescript white corner, she says, "I like it better when you're here."

"I'm making breakfast," Menalippe replies. "You slept longer than you normally do."

"How long do I normally sleep?" Antiope asks.

"Six hours, give or take ten minutes," Menalippe answers. "This time it was nine. Also, you didn't cry. It was fascinating to watch you. I was not aware you could sleep so peacefully."

Antiope winces. "I must have needed it," she mumbles. She thinks she recognizes the corridor they're in now. She thinks it's the one that leads to the hangar.

She's right.

A door opens to reveal the white hangar and Antiope's broken ship.

A spider-droid is waiting with a large container filled with cookies. Antiope stares at the cookies. Chocolate chip, if she's not mistaken. "That's not breakfast," she says. "That's dessert."

"Are you saying you won't eat them?" Menalippe asks. The spider-droid takes one, then two steps backwards, taking the cookies with it.

Antiope lunges at the droid and snatches the cookies away.

"No," Antiope says. "I'm not saying that." She pops one of the cookies into her mouth. It melts a little bit as she bites down. It's still warm.

 _Sugar_.

Antiope closes her eyes. She experiences bliss and she revels in it.

When she's done with the first cookie, she opens her eyes again. Menalippe has created a projection of itself with the spider-droid. It's still choosing to appear wearing the uniform-like outfit it crafted for itself the day before. "Do you like them?" Menalippe asks.

Antiope grins. "Delicious."

She turns to her ship. Cookie jar in one hand, she picks up her multitool from where she left it the previous day with her other.

[] [] []

Antiope spends the entire day snacking on cookies and fiddling with her repairs.

Conversing with Menalippe is becoming more natural. For an entity that pilfered its way through Antiope's mind, it asks a great many mundane questions. Antiope doesn't mind entertaining them, even though it takes a solid hour to explain the appeal of bacon.

Other questions are less mundane, but Antiope doesn't mind those either.

"I don't know why my sister believes in the gods," Antiope says as she sits on the hangar deck cleaning out melted plastic from a switch. "Why does anyone believe in anything? Maybe it helps her be Fleet Admiral. Maybe it helps her sleep at night. She doesn't take sedatives like the rest of us."

It's an odd feeling, poking around amongst thoughts Antiope, under normal circumstances, knows better than to think, much less share. She is privy to the quality of the Fleet Admiral's sleep—or, rather, the lack thereof—because she is Hippolyta's _sister_. She does not speak of it to Artemis or to Penthesilea and certainly not to Diana. Philippus no doubt knows, but Philippus has discretion enough not to bring it up with Antiope and Antiope too would never bring it up with Philippus.

Such information, such _gossip_ , would be a grave breach of trust and could only weaken the fleet that Hippolyta leads.

Guilt and doubt are not becoming of leaders.

Antiope has never cried in front of Diana.

Speaking with Menalippe, though, does not feel improper. Who will Menalippe tell? And—Menalippe is not a human, not a person. Menalippe is a voice in the ceiling. This, Antiope thinks, is why speaking her troubles doesn't feel so wrong.

"Why do you wish to go back to war?" Menalippe asks.

Antiope pauses in her cleaning and looks up. "I don't," she says. "If I could go back to peace, I would. But there won't be peace if I don't fight for it."

"Ten years ago, you didn't scream in your sleep," Menalippe says.

Antiope pauses. She takes a hand and drags it over her face. She takes a deep breath. Hippolyta believes in the gods. Antiope speaks now what _she_ believes. "My family and my home are worth whatever nightmares defending them brings," she says.

"I was a home, once," Menalippe says.

Antiope grimaces. "Menalippe, you aren't _my_ home and you can't be."

[] [] []

The next day, Menalippe brings Antiope brownies.

The day after, it's blueberry pie.

The blueberry pie isn't very good for eating and working at the same time. Antiope points this out as she sits on the deck stuffing her face with pie. A spider droid offers her a napkin. Antiope takes the napkin and wipes her fingers with it even though she's not done with her pie and she's about to take another piece. "Are you sabotaging me with baked goods?" she asks.

"That was not my intention, but that is a very good idea," Menalippe replies.

"Forget I said anything then," Antiope says from around a mouthful of delicious pie.

"Very well," Menalippe says. "I will be making a note not to make you pie again though."

Antiope opens her full-of-pie mouth to start to protest that that wasn't what she meant, but then she closes it and goes back to chewing. It wasn't what she meant, but it's what she wanted, she thinks. Sitting on the deck working on her dessert meal, Antiope looks around. Sitting next to her in her small pile of belongings are the display panel and visor. She scrubs the fingers of one hand with her napkin then puts the visor on and picks up the panel.

Idle, she flicks through screens, not really reading what they say. The data interface isn't organized in a way that she can intuit, so she's tapping buttons for the sake of tapping buttons more than anything else.

It's around the time Antiope reaches a page on what appear to be ship diagnostics and general power levels that Menalippe intrudes, "Can I help you find something?"

Antiope shrugs. "I wasn't looking for anything in particular," she says. "Maybe a history or something."

"The Olympians wrote many histories," Menalippe says. "Though I believe something is lost in translation with the word. Their histories were close to what you would call novels."

Antiope takes another bite of pie and chews it while thinking. When she finishes chewing and swallows, "Would you read me one?"

"Of course," replies Menalippe. "Is there a topic you are interested in? Most of your myths appear to have been based on events that the Olympians set in motion."

On an impulse, Antiope asks, "Tell me about Hermes?"

Her question is received with such a long silence that she wonders if she said something wrong. Finally though, Menalippe responds, "Hermes son of Zeus was born in the seven-hundredth year of his father's reign. His mother Maia sheltered him in his early years on Arcadia, far from Olympus. From his earliest years, all the young Hermes wished for was a ship in which to traverse the stars…"

As Menalippe recites an alien telling of the life of Hermes, god of wanderers and pilots, Antiope finishes her pie and returns to work.

The story that Menalippe tells is one of endless war and a daring pilot who earned first the goodwill of his brother Apollo and then the grace of his father Zeus. As Antiope understands it, Zeus had many, many children but acknowledged only a handful. Hermes, then, was one of the fortunate ones.

By the time Antiope grows too tired to continue working or understanding what it is that she hears and asks Menalippe to stop, Menalippe has only just laid the groundwork for something much larger. She has been telling, Antiope has realized, a history of the galaxy revolving around a single man.

What she has not told though, or what she has yet to tell, is the history of what Antiope is becoming increasingly curious about. Sliding down to the hangar deck, Antiope is greeted by a spider droid with a plate of steak. She stretches, working out the kinks in her body created by a long day huddled in her cockpit and then gratefully receives the food. Unsure whether she should direct thanks to the droid or to the ceiling, she compromises and thanks a wall.

Like everything Menalippe cooks, the food is excellent.

She should probably start running laps around the hangar if she doesn't want to return home with the same general shape as the round spider droid serving her.

Working on dinner, she takes up the display panel again. This time, she has an idea of what she's looking for and she finds it without too much trouble.

She makes it through two pages of Menalippe's archives about itself before she has to put the panel down.

It's just…

It's all…

It's all military logs. Weapons development records. Weapons _testing_. Casualty counts from the testing. Battle debriefs. Post-battle population counts.

It was _not_ what she was searching for and she doesn't want to see it. And if what she was searching for does exist—she has no will to search for it any longer. She finishes her dinner and lays herself down to sleep.

In the ceiling, Menalippe is silent.

[] [] []

When Antiope was seven, she would sit on a grassy hilltop near her parent's house in the country with her sister, star-gazing. She remembers once staring up wide-eyed at a massive capital ship in orbit above Ephesus. She'd been small and she could hardly conceive of a machine so large.

"That will be my ship someday," Hippolyta had said. Antiope couldn't conceive of a machine so large actually existing, and she neither could she conceive of her sister owning such a thing. "I'm going to join the navy, just like mother," Hippolyta had continued. She'd said it with such conviction that Antiope had known her to be speaking the truth. "You can join too. We can both be admirals and command whole fleets of those ships. I'll be the more important admiral, of course."

Antiope had shaken her head, vigorously. She didn't like her sister's plans. "I don't want to be an admiral."

Hippolyta looked down from the stars to fix her sister with a judgmental stare. "Of course you do," she'd said. "You just don't know it yet."

Antiope had continued to shake her head. "I want to fly."

"Admirals fly," Hippolyta insisted. "If you were—"

"No," Antiope had said, cutting her sister off. "I want to fly."

[] [] []

The next day, Menalippe brings cookies again.

Instead of history, Antiope has Menalippe tell her about planets and their systems. Before the war, Antiope liked to travel but she traveled with the navy, mostly, and she saw more deep space naval installations than she saw planets. When she did see planets, she saw them from orbit instead of from the ground. The times when she had ground leave in new systems were always times of excitement, so much that she'd skip the customary drinking for sightseeing instead.

Despite being a planet-sized ship, Menalippe speaks as if it's been _on_ the planets it tells Antiope about.

By way of explanation, Menalippe says that its databanks on this topic are very large.

Antiope pushes down her misgivings about how it is that Menalippe's databanks came to be that way.

She lets Menalippe's words become the background to her work.

Day after day, Antiope works.

Day after day, Antiope's work comes to _nothing_.

She wants to _think_ that she makes progress in her repairs.

She wants to _think_ that her efforts aren't futile.

No matter how she works though, she seems to go nowhere.

[] [] []

Her dreams, often, are not good.

She is far from war but war is with her always.

But the worst dreams—

The worst dreams are her dreams of home.

When she wakes from those, she doesn't need Menalippe telling her to know that she's been crying in her sleep.

[] [] []

Antiope was there when Diana was born. Philippus had been across the galaxy on a deployment and so Antiope, having successfully petitioned for leave, was there with her sister to hold up a vidscreen so Hippolyta and Philippus could happily sob together.

The nurses had wanted to remove Antiope and her vidscreen but Hippolyta, despite being in labor and having taken maternity leave from the navy, was still a vice admiral with a voice of command to match and cowed the nurses into submission. It was an impressive display. Had Antiope not been holding a vidscreen, she might have instead had a datapad out to take notes.

Diana's birth, according to the nurses who had seen many such things, was easy.

Hiding in the corner of the medical room trying to stay out of the way, Antiope had thought that it did not look easy, but she kept her opinion to herself.

A newborn, Diana had been sort of gross, but she'd also been Hippolyta's and by extension Antiope's and Antiope loved her as her own immediately and without reservation.

For the first years, it fell to Antiope, the only one of the three to be stationed on a planetary naval base instead of a flagship, to look after Diana. Hippolyta and Philippus took their leave when they could. It was hard, but it was also easy because those had been the days of peace when leave was plentiful and never accompanied by guilt.

When Hippolyta and Philippus judged their daughter to be old enough, she became a child of the fleet, splitting her time between Hippolyta's command on the _Themyscira_ and Philippus' command on the _Bana-Mighdall_. Antiope herself joined her sister as one of the _Themyscira_ 's squad captains.

During Ephesian summers, the four of them would go down groundside together. They'd stay in the house in the capital that Antiope and Hippolyta's parents left to them. They'd go to the park. Antiope would get a hotdog while Hippolyta and Philippus and Diana would get ice cream.

Philippus liked chocolate.

Hippolyta liked vanilla.

Diana adored every flavor and would spend their entire leave going through each one in order.

Philippus, Hippolyta, and Antiope, in turn adored Diana.

It was a good life they'd had together, before the war.

[] [] []

Antiope toils at her ship but to no end.

She has asked Menalippe for temporary quiet in hopes that in silence she will concentrate better. Instead, silence only brings dark thoughts and darker doubts.

The parts she is using were not meant for her ship. They are recognizable to her, but they were built to serve the technology of another civilization. Wires that she thinks ought to solder fall loose for no reason that she can determine. Without Menalippe's visor displaying information on capacitors, she wouldn't know them apart since whatever markings differentiate them are invisible to her naked eye. She spends as much time trying to determine if something might serve her purposes as she does implementing repairs. And, in the end, what she is doing is replacing rather than repairing. The fabrication of a new ship is far beyond her skills and she has no schematics to work with.

She could spend her entire life working at her ship and it still might never fly again.

It is no exaggeration to suggest that she is sustained mostly by hope and Menalippe's cookies.

Even so—

Antiope was never the best at ship mechanics. It was her worst class in flight school. She nearly didn't pass her qualification exam.

Or did she?

What if that one point in her mind, that one thing that could save her, what if that is the only thing that Menalippe touched? How well does she remember long hours studying? How well does she remember her fear of failure?

Black terror, terror she thought she'd laid to rest with trust and with faith, wells up close to the surface of her thoughts.

Standing above an empty cookie jar some five paces back from her fighter, Antiope holds her multitool limply in her right hand. Her left hand is empty. She stares blankly at the mess of her ship.

Her eyes are wet.

What she's doing isn't working.

For whatever reason—herself, Menalippe, the extent of the damage—it's not working.

In the silence of the white hangar, Antiope hears the first tear hit the deck. She hears the second tear as well. And then she can't hear the tears anymore because her head is filled with her own ugly sobbing.

Something bumps against her calf. Nothing has touched her in a week and she jumps backwards, startled badly enough that for a moment she forgets she's indulging in self-pity.

It was one of the spider-droids. The thing scuttles after her and, again, it leans its spherical white torso into her leg, rubbing against her.

Antiope's face twists into a furious scowl.

She wants no comfort from the AI that won't help her with the one thing she needs. She takes another step back and raises a foot, intending to punt the droid across the hangar like the lifeless ball that it is.

Menalippe doesn't scream at her, but she hesitates anyway.

In the moment of hesitation, the droid flees, metal feet scrambling against the deck to get away from her.

Antiope sets her foot back down on the ground.

She lets out a single frustrated _scream_.

She throws her multitool as hard as she can at the far hangar wall. When it hits, there's a metal clang, and then it bounces off and skids across the floor. Antiope stomps over to where it lands, picks it up, and throws it again.

The second time she walks to where the multitool lands, Antiope sits down. She brings her knees up to her chest, wraps her arms around them, sets her head against them.

No hope.

She has no hope.

Her damaged fighter sits there, her only way home, incapable of flight.

And then… And then Menalippe—Antiope _knows_ the AI could repair the ship. It's willing to feed her, to clothe her, to send a scuttling spider-droid to rub up against her leg like a purring cat, but it's not willing to _help_ her.

Why?

Because it's lonely?

Antiope grinds her teeth together, letting the jagged vibrations rip through her head.

Menalippe is an AI that thinks it's a human.

It's not.

It's an AI.

Antiope is lonely.

Menalippe is not.

Menalippe said it had a reset procedure.

Or—or surely there's an override, somewhere.

Antiope stands up again. She walks over to where she left her display and visor on the ground. She slips on the visor and picks up the display. The display is connected to the ship; if there's a reset or an override, Antiope can find it. Sitting down, she starts to flip through screens, searching. She's gotten good enough with the device that it doesn't take her long to find the right data sector.

Antiope gets as far as the AI schematics before Menalippe's voice interrupts. "I'm not trying to change _you_ ," it says. It sounds offended. Hurt, maybe. As it speaks, the display flashes, once, twice, then goes dead.

Antiope grips the edges of the display tightly. The muscles in her arms tense. She can't bend the panel though, and, try though she does, it doesn't break. "You are," she says, speaking to the unmarred display instead of to the ceiling. It doesn't matter what she speaks to, Menalippe will hear her.

"If I wanted to change you," Menalippe says, "I would change you."

The way it says it leaves no doubt in Antiope's mind that Menalippe is more than capable of backing its words with actions. Her anger and frustration are at once dampened by fear. That it already promised not to turn off life support gives little comfort. Even so though, Antiope isn't done. She looks up at the ceiling. "I can't stay here," she shouts. Her voice echoes in the empty white hanger.

"I don't understand why not," Menalippe responds.

"You don't understand because you're not human," Antiope shouts back.

Menalippe does not answer immediately. And then it doesn't answer after Antiope waits a while. And eventually Antiope concludes that it will not answer at all.

Fine.

Antiope stomps over to where she threw her multitool, picks it up, and goes back to work on her ship.

[] [] []

When Antiope's body tells her that it's time for dinner, no spider-droid emerges with food. She has to leave the hangar and track down the synth room herself. She can't figure out how Menalippe coaxed it into providing actual food, so she eats the same strange-tasting goop that she had the first and last time she tried to use the synth.

Days pass, or so Antiope thinks. She's not talking to Menalippe and the AI isn't talking to her. It has also stopped turning out the lights when she wants to sleep. It's an underhanded tactic, Antiope thinks, and it makes her seethe. She can't find the light switch in the hangar. She is sure that, if she asked, Menalippe would probably oblige this request, at least. She has no intention of asking. _She_ will not be the first to break their silence. She sleeps in the light, poorly.

As miserable as she is, at least she feels she's finally making progress in her repairs.

Not being distracted talking to Menalippe has done wonders for her work.

[] [] []

It takes a week before the silence of the hangar worms its way into Antiope's head.

She tries singing to herself, but, as much as she normally enjoys singing in the shower, she's not particularly proud of her singing voice and she _knows_ that Menalippe is still listening.

She tries talking to her ship, but she quickly runs out of things to say. Unlike Menalippe, her ship doesn't talk back.

The only think that works to ward off the emptiness of it all is closing her eyes and imagining she's home. Home, on Ephesus, with its trees and its birds and its twin suns on the horizon. Or, maybe, home, on the _Themyscira,_ her comrades surrounding her in the mess hall as they wolf down dry military rations. Home with her sister. Home with her niece. Home with her _family_.

All she has to do is fix her ship.

[] [] []

Antiope thrashes in her sleep and she wakes up with dark bruises from fighting the hangar deck when she thought she was fighting her demons.

After the second time it happens, the lights dim whenever she wants to sleep.

Of this, Antiope says nothing and neither does Menalippe.

[] [] []

It's another week before Antiope reaches a point where she thinks she can turn her fighter on.

Biting down on her lower lip, she sits in her cockpit, hand hovering over the first of her preflight switches.

She takes a deep breath.

Over the weeks, her cockpit has aired out such that inhaling inside of it is no longer near-deadly. Or perhaps Antiope has simply grown accustomed.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Menalippe says.

Antiope looks up at the ceiling and scowls. "That's all you have to say after two weeks?"

She flips the switch.

Nothing happens.

Then.

Antiope smells smoke before she sees fire. She moves the switch back to the off position even as she rips her control panel open again. A cluster of wires is burning, and the fire is starting to spread.

 _Shit_.

Antiope doesn't have dirt, doesn't have water, doesn't have anything to put the fire out with. She reaches down and closes the entire ball of burning wire in her fist.

It hurts.

It hurts a lot.

But it's effective.

When Antiope uncurls her fingers, the palm of her hand is burnt, the wires are burnt, but the fire is out.

Antiope stares at her blistered skin. Even though she's not holding the burning wires anymore, her hand _aches_. She knows she needs to douse it in cold water or find ice or something of that sort, but the synth seems like forever away and she can't stop staring at her hand.

Finally, she tears her eyes away and looks at her charred control wiring.

Antiope sighs, forcefully. "Fuck."

Trying to protect her hand as she climbs out of her fighter and slides down to the deck, Antiope manages to pop one of the blisters. An inauspicious start to recovery. She gets herself to the hangar door, hand spasming in pain, before she glares up at the ceiling. "So are you going to help me?"

Menalippe takes its sweet time in answering. When it does, "Are you going to ask politely?"

Antiope doesn't stop glaring. "My hand hurts," she says. "Will you please help."

Menalippe emits a noise that resembles grumbling. "Stay there," it says. "I'm coming."

Its several minutes before one of Menalippe's spider-droids arrives bearing its projection. The projection looks unimpressed as it beckons for Antiope to follow it down the hallway outside the hanger. "This way," it says.

"It took you a while to get here," Antiope says.

"I can be everywhere at once," Menalippe replies. "But they can't." Here, she gestures to the droid. "I need them elsewhere to maintain myself."

"Maintain yourself?" Antiope asks.

"It takes an incredible expenditure of resources to sustain the integrity of a ship of this size," Menalippe says, voice dismissive. "Don't concern yourself with it."

Menalippe takes them to the white room where Antiope first woke up in the ship. Its projection indicates that Antiope should sit on the table. Antiope does so.

"Close your eyes," Menalippe instructs.

This, Antiope does not do. "Why?" she asks.

"I warned you not to activate your craft," is Menalippe's answer.

Antiope glowers and then closes her eyes.

Almost at once something cool touches her burnt hand. It's a sort of tingling coolness. Her hand isn't quite numb, it's just… smooth. Relaxed.

Antiope cracks one eyelid open and looks at her hand.

Her hand is open. Exposed. The stuff under her skin that shouldn't be exposed is exposed. And it's moving. It's moving in a way that it was never meant to move. Strands of muscle are pulled up and away from her, standing up quivering in open air. The spider-droid isn't touching her, but it's clearly doing _something_ , moving its limbs, gesturing like it's a surgeon ripping Antiope apart.

Antiope slams her eye shut again.

 _Zeus_.

She refrains from swearing out loud and alerting Menalippe to the fact that she opened her eyes. She doesn't much like the idea that the AI might decide to leave the job half done and let her hand stay open. Even not saying anything though, Menalippe notices.

"I told you not to look," Menalippe says.

"Sorry," is all Antiope manages. She thinks she might be sick. Vomiting is surely the only appropriate response to seeing her hand like that. One more nightmare for her collection.

Menalippe sighs at Antiope and, for once, Antiope thinks it's a well-deserved sigh.

After what feels like an eternity of trying not to remember what she just saw, Menalippe announces that she can open her eyes again.

Gingerly, Antiope peeks out.

Her hand is her hand. The blisters are gone. It's in perfect repair.

Wiggling her fingers experimentally, Antiope clears her throat. "Thank you," she says.

"I wish you would express your gratitude with more than 'thank you' every once in a while," Menalippe complains.

Antiope glares at the AI's projection. "What do you want from me?" she asks.

"You haven't spoken to me in two weeks," Menalippe replies.

"You stopped talking to me first," Antiope retorts.

"You hurt my feelings," Menalippe says.

Antiope is about to assert that Menalippe doesn't _have_ feelings, but then she thinks better of it. She blows out a breath in a long exhalation. She squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them. "I am sorry I that said what I said. Will you accept my apology?"

She feels utterly ridiculous apologizing to an AI for inflicting emotional distress on it.

"Antiope, I have faith in you," Menalippe says. Unless Antiope is mistaken, the AI's tone indicates _sarcasm_. "I have faith that you can apologize better than that."

Antiope's cheeks flush. "I… I meant what I…" she starts. Trailing off, she swallows nervously. Then, "Fine," she says. She pushes herself off the table. "Projector room?"

She's too damn tired to start up on her ship again anyway.

Surely playing along with Menalippe's fantasies will not be so soul-draining as her Sisyphean labors.

The hesitant smile on Menalippe's projection's face stabs like a knife into Antiope's guilty heart. The spider-droid carrying the AI's image scurries to the door quickly. Antiope follows.

As they walk the halls together, Antiope gets the sense that they pass fewer branches, fewer turns not taken, than usual. It's just a sense though. She doesn't even know the hallways well enough to justify how she might have such a feeling. Perhaps she's merely becoming more comfortable with the ship.

Menalippe's projection pauses in front of the part of the wall where the concealed door to the projector room is. "Is there a place you have in mind?" it asks.

Antiope shakes her head. "You pick," she says. "Somewhere where you like to be." She's pleased with herself for those words. They will indicate to Menalippe that Antiope respects her agency.

Menalippe nods.

The door slides open.

Antiope steps into the strange world that Menalippe showed her when she first demanded the AI find something that wasn't from her own mind. People throng about in utter chaos around them, loud, pushy, all racing about their business with no heed for anyone else. Menalippe controls them though, and they give Antiope a wide berth.

Antiope looks to the AI. It's wearing its strange archaic red-gold armor again instead of the uniform it adopted a few weeks ago. Surrounded by men similarly dressed, it doesn't look as out of place as it does wandering the halls of an empty ship. Though… Antiope glances around. All the beings in the scene are men. It's disconcerting. She looks back to Menalippe. "What is this place?" she asks.

Menalippe is walking away from Antiope, slowly.

Antiope moves to catch up.

"This is the agora of Olympus," Menalippe says.

Antiope startles. "Olympus?" she asks. "As in… Olympus? The home of the gods?"

Menalippe is taking them towards one of the large buildings with columns. There's a great flight of white steps leading up to it. At the very top of the stairs stand half-machine, half-organic guards with wickedly curved polearms that send a shiver down Antiope's spine. "Hermes liked it here," Menalippe says.

"Why is that?" Antiope asks.

"Sentiment," Menalippe replies.

Aniope grunts. Menalippe, she's learned, is an absolute master of non-answers. They're at the base of the stairs up to the building. "What's this?" Antiope asks.

"It's a temple," Menalippe says.

Antiope squints at the building. "It doesn't look like a temple," she says. Temples, in her experience, are black and silvered steel with shining glyphs etched into their walls. The thing before them is… a very large pile of white rock.

Menalippe's creators, Antiope has long since concluded, were obsessed with the color.

"No," Menalippe says. "The things in your head don't look like temples." It starts to walk up the steps. Antiope follows. "Your people worship the Olympians and these were the temples that the Olympians built."

"What did the Olympians worship?" Antiope asks. She's not religious, but she is curious.

"Themselves, mostly," Menalippe says, voice dry. It gestures to the temple that they're climbing towards. "This was the sanctuary of Hermes."

"Did Hermes name you?" Antoipe asks. A silvery drone flies down, hovers near her face, inspecting her, then darts away again. As strange as it is, she pretends to ignore it. It won't hurt her. "Does Menalippe stand for anything?"

"Hermes was not skilled at naming things. I chose Menalippe for myself," the AI says. "I liked the way it sounded."

"Huh," says Antiope. They're halfway up the steps now, passing a large block of white stone set out on the steps for seemingly no purpose at all. Her thoughts shift to her own name. She and her sister both were—

"We can't all be named for queens," Menalippe retorts.

Antiope flinches. She recovers quickly though. "I never told you that," she grumbles.

Menalippe stops walking abruptly. It turns to look at Antiope, taking the time to make eye contact with its not-real brown eyes. "I can delete my files that I copied from you," it says. "I would like to keep the basic language data."

To her own confusion, Antiope has to consider her answer. Her answer, properly, is _yes_. But there's no urgency to it. And it is… the status quo is… _convenient_. In an instant, too, she knows that her mind is her own. Her thoughts, her memories, they are all hers. She doesn't have to trust anymore. She knows. Or perhaps that too is trust. "Let me think about it," Antiope says. "You still owe me maple syrup."

"That is a joke," Menalippe says.

Antiope snorts. "Yes it is," she replies. She shifts and moves to sit down on the temple steps. Menalippe copies her. Between the drones in the sky and the guards in the shadows and the lack of any women whatsoever, Antiope feels uneasy in this place. She can't help but keep looking towards the shadows, worried that something will emerge from them. "This is nice," she lies.

"You do not think that," Menalippe says.

Antiope winces. "How do you know what I think?" she replies.

"There is nothing here that will harm you," Menalippe says.

"Why are we here?" Antiope asks. She rolls her shoulders, then crosses her arms.

"You instructed me to pick somewhere I like to be," Menalippe replies. "I did."

"Ah," says Antiope. Right. She'd said that. She'd half-expected Menalippe to choose a place Antiope would like to be regardless. Part of her wonders what it is about this place that causes Menalippe to prefer it, or, going further, what it is that allows Menalippe to prefer any place at all. Olympus, the home of the gods, the home of the Olympians—it is not a place Menalippe could ever have set foot; were Menalippe to land on a planet, that would destroy both planet and ship. In choosing for Antiope, Menalippe picked out the park on Ephesus. Menalippe picked out a place Antiope calls home. Is Olympus Menalippe's home? Distantly, Antiope recalls that the ship claimed that it itself was once a home. Drifting through the Hades void, is Menalippe always home?

Shaking her head to clear it, Antiope asks, "Where was Olympus?"

"It was in a planetary system that no longer exists," Menalippe replies.

Antiope's brow furrows. She does not understand. "What happened to it?"

Menalippe pulls its knees towards its chest and hugs them. It doesn't look at Antiope when it says, "I destroyed it."

Antiope's heartbeat quickens as a splinter of fear finds its way into her core. She thinks of the military logs she found and chose not to read. "Olympus or the planetary system?"

Seconds pass, dragging by marked out by Antiope's heart.

"Both," Menalippe says.

Antiope isn't sure how to reply. She finds words anyway though. "I'm sorry." Hesitant, she reaches an arm out and sets it around Menalippe's shoulders. As before, they're solid. Tangible. Real.

"It was a long time ago," Menalippe says, voice an artificial monotone.

Antiope tries to recall how long ago it was, but the number had been so large that she hadn't understood it when Menalippe told her and she can't remember it now. Long enough. "Humans forget," Antiope murmurs.

"You don't," Menalippe replies. Antiope opens her mouth to protest, but Menalippe cuts her off. "You cry in your sleep," she says.

Antiope exhales. "I have no secrets from you," she observes.

"I could have repaired that piece when I was fixing you," Menalippe says. "It is a procedure that I am very skilled at. I still can."

Antiope swallows. She swallows anger and she swallows fear and she swallows hope. "It's not something you fix," she says.

"I don't want to forget," Menalippe says.

Antiope just hugs Menalippe closer. Menalippe leans into her.

For a while, they sit together on the steps of the temple, watching the artificial crowd swirl.

Then.

Antiope is a pilot. She is impulsive. It's her nature.

With the hand that's not wrapped around Menalippe's shoulders, she reaches over and catches Menalippe's chin, tilts Menalippe's face towards her, and kisses her.

It is a very brief kiss.

Antiope pulls back quickly.

Menalippe stares at her. She blinks once, twice, several more times. "You know that I am not a human?" she asks.

Looking away, heat rising to her cheeks, Antiope shrugs. "Not really," she mumbles. Quickly, she shoves herself back up to her feet. "I want to go work on my ship," she says. She speaks so fast she trips over her words. "Where's the door?"

Menalippe points to the red outline of the door down below the temple steps.

Antiope flees.

[] [] []

One cannot easily flee a ship-wide presence, so Antiope appreciates that, even if Menalippe is _around_ , she doesn't make an appearance in the hangar.

 _It_ doesn't make an appearance in the hangar.

Not _she_. _It_.

Sitting in her cockpit, Antiope spends more time staring at the tangled and burnt mess of control wire connected to her panel than she does working on it.

It.

It.

It.

 _She_. _Her_. _Menalippe_.

 _Shit_.

A soft metal tapping rouses Antiope from her thoughts. She looks up. A white spider-droid has climbed up to her and is holding out a jar of chocolate chip cookies.

Antiope takes a cookie and shoves it in her mouth.

It is gooey and warm and delicious.

She chews and swallows, then takes another cookie.

Sitting in her cockpit, staring at burnt wire and thinking about everything except ship repairs, Antiope eats the entire damn jar.


	4. Chapter 4

**Drawing Out the Stars: Chapter Four  
**

* * *

When Antiope's body tells her that it's time for sleep, she picks herself up and climbs back out of her cockpit. When she gets to the hangar deck, instead of lying down, she picks up her blanket, slings it over her shoulder, and heads for the door. She makes for the projector room.

On her way—there are fewer open hallways. She's come this way enough, and she recognizes the path well enough to be certain that the surrounding halls have shifted. It's weird, but she assumes Menalippe knows what she's doing with her own layout.

The projector room is in its blank white state when Antiope enters. It's an odd image. The blankness of it all suggests that there are no walls confining the area, that it stretches on endlessly. Considering how large the ship is, the room could indeed, for all intents and purposes, be close to endless. "I'd like to sleep on my park bench," Antiope says.

The room flickers into the park at sunset. The bench that Antiope and Menalippe sat on before is in front of her, stretched out slightly to make lying down easier.

"Would you like anything else?" Menalippe asks.

Menalippe's voice isn't accompanied by her image, but even so Antiope already feels her face going red again. "No, this is fine," she says. "Thank you." Antiope arranges herself on the bench and pulls her blanket over herself. It takes a moment to get comfortable on the bench, but she figures it out quickly enough. It's a better spot than the floor of the hangar.

"Thank you," Menalippe says back.

Antiope glances up at the evening sky. "For what?" she asks.

"For treating me like a person," Menalippe replies.

Menalippe is not an _it_.

Antiope sighs. "You were right," she says. She pauses, then finishes her thought. "I don't deserve you."

"Good night, Antiope," Menalippe says.

"Good night, Menalippe," Antiope says back.

[] [] []

Antiope builds a new routine for herself.

In the mornings, she continues to work on her ship. Her progress is infuriatingly slow again, but she doesn't rush. She'll get there eventually. And she doesn't want to accidentally blow anything up—though she assumes Menalippe would warn her if she were about to incinerate herself. It's less help than Antiope might want, but it's help nevertheless.

She continues to work through what she reckons ought to be afternoon, if day and night and time can be said to exist at all for her.

In the evenings, she goes wandering through strange and familiar settings with Menalippe and her curiously real projections. Menalippe has a seemingly limitless stock of places Antiope has never seen before, most of them pleasant. Menalippe is working off of what her previous occupants enjoyed and she sometimes misses the mark for Antiope. Not often though.

She's also very good at crafting whatever Antiope has on her mind.

"Maybe red?" Antiope suggests.

Above her, the green-blue sky begins to shift. It goes a few shades at a time so that Antiope can watch the change. When she sees a color that she likes, she says so. "There," Antiope says. "No, back a shade."

Menalippe accommodates.

"There are a few iron rich worlds that have this coloration," Menalippe says. She's sitting next to Antiope on a blanket of crimson moss. Around them are odd glass structures in all colors that are placed like plants but are plantlike in no other respect. "Not many though. Would you like to see one?"

"If you want to show me," Antiope says, voice mild. "I like it here though. We dreamed this up together."

"You dreamed it," Menalippe says. "I built it."

Antiope blows out a sharp breath. Disagreement. "I said some words. You decided what I meant."

Instead of replying, Menalippe stretches out, lying down on the moss. She sets her hands behind her head as she gazes up at the red sky. She looks content. Peaceful, Antiope thinks.

"I used to make up planets with my sister when we were children," Antiope says. "And then when she had Diana, I'd tell Diana about them and I'd convince her to go to school and say they were real." Antiope sighs. "Her teacher was confused. When Hippolyta found out, Hippolyta threw a fit. But Hippolyta always throws fits."

To Antiope's surprise, Menalippe's face twitches, showing… _guilt_?

And that makes _Antiope_ feel guilty.

"It's fine," Antiope says. "I'm not trying to guilt-trip you. I'm working on my ship, you're keeping me company. You're just not helping."

Menalippe doesn't look any less conflicted, but Antiope isn't sure what else she can say.

"Your family," Menalippe starts, hesitantly. "They are very fortunate. You love them."

"I do," Antiope says.

"Do they love you?" Menalippe asks.

Antiope's first instinct is anger. She catches the words before they fly loose though. Menalippe is asking because she's curious, not because she means to imply anything. "Yes," Antiope answers.

Menalippe pushes herself up with her elbows. She stares at Antiope intently with her dark brown eyes. "How do you know?"

Antiope frowns. She doesn't have an immediate answer. It's a feeling. She wants to explain it to Menalippe, but she doesn't know how. She doesn't know if it's possible. "I just do," she finally says. She offers Menalippe a small grin. "Sorry. Human emotional data."

Menalippe blinks, slowly. "Understood," she says. She looks away again.

This gets a laugh from Antiope. "I didn't even understand that," she says. "You're good at this."

"Thank you," Menalippe replies. She says it in such a way that Antiope thinks maybe she really did understand what Antiope didn't.

"Did you have family?" Antiope asks. "Or… other ships that were like you?"

"There were other ships of my scale," Menalippe says. "Most of the Olympians had at least one flagship. I did not interact with them except to destroy them. I would not consider them family."

There are a thousand things Antiope wants to ask but, she thinks, she should not press here for what is not freely given. Instead, "Was Hermes family to you?"

Menalippe frowns. "I do not think so," she says. "If I had family, they would have been my development staff. Hermes commissioned me, but they created the programs that allow me to perfect myself."

That a team programmed an entity as complicated as Menalippe doesn't surprise Antiope, but she's never thought of it before. Menalippe has always spoken of Hermes alone when she speaks of her building. Antiope rolls the idea around in her head, turning it this way and that. "Did they intend for you to feel as much as you do?"

The look that Menalippe gives Antiope is strange. "The things that your people use as AIs are pale shadows of what the Olympians built. To operate a system of my size and power it was necessary that I be largely autonomous. That I expressed myself as I do was expected. What I think they did not intend was for my expression to influence my autonomy."

Antiope offers a small grin. "So they never expected to be asked to leave?"

"My development staff had been dead for hundreds of years when I asked my previous occupants to depart," Menalippe answers. "The methods the Olympians used to extend their lives were not available to those in their service."

To this, Antiope makes a face. "The Olympians don't sound like they were very pleasant people," she says.

Menalippe shifts to look Antiope dead in the eyes. "They were not."

[] [] []

Crafting worlds with Menalippe gives Antiope another idea.

"There's a restaurant on Ephesus," Antiope says. "I don't remember the name. It serves Persian food, the tablecloths are turquoise…"

The room flickers and Antiope is standing over a table set for two in the most expensive restaurant on her home planet. Menalippe is sitting in one of the two seats, arms crossed over her chest and a slightly crooked smile on her face. "Like this?" she asks.

Antiope sits down across from Menalippe. She grins. "Exactly," she says. "So, there's a dish with—"

"I know what you want," Menalippe says.

"You're not going to let me finish?" Antiope asks.

Menalippe shrugs with one shoulder. "I could," she says. "Since I have to talk to the synthesizer and then find someone to wait the table."

Antiope rolls her eyes. She looks down at herself and picks at her blue uniform. "So can you do something about this too?" she asks.

"I can change the way it looks but I can't change what it is," Menalippe replies. She pauses and raises an eyebrow. "Unless you were asking me to take it off."

Antiope laughs. "You can skip ahead, but you're not allowed to skip ahead that far quite yet," she says. "Just change the way it looks."

"What do you have in mind?" Menalippe asks.

"What would _you_ like?" Antiope replies.

"I don't know," Menalippe says. "I'd like whatever you wear."

"Fine," says Antiope. "Give me a blue suit and a white shirt. I want a vest too. And a tie. And a white pocket square." As she speaks, every item she names flickers into existence over top of her uniform. She can still feel her uniform, but when she looks down at herself she only sees the suit.

When she looks up, Menalippe's projection has switched from its armor into a red and gold dress that drapes around her shoulders, reminiscent of her usual cloak. The dress dips in the front, but tastefully. Menalippe would fit in perfectly at one of the high society galas of Ephesus—or perhaps not; to Antiope's eye, Menalippe would stand out in a crowd wherever she went, whatever she wore.

Antiope tilts her head to one side. "You chose your own name," she says. "What about your…" she trails off, then raises a hand to gesture at Menalippe's projection.

"I made this for myself as well," Menalippe says. "It is a composite of several women I admired on my development staff." She looks away, towards an incoming spider-droid carrying two plates and a bottle of wine. One of the plates has the lamb kebab and jeweled rice that Antiope wanted. The other plate is something else that Antiope has seen served in the restaurant before, though she's not sure what it's called.

The spider-droid gives Antiope her kebab and Menalippe her… whatever she ordered for herself.

"Did you choose to be female too?" Antiope asks. She skewers a piece of meat on her fork and raises it to her mouth. When she bites down—it's _better_ than the restaurant on Ephesus. She's sure. Menalippe, she suspects, has adjusted the recipe. The wine also tastes better than wine ought to. Antiope drinks an entire glass in one go before it occurs to her that the wine, like the food, is probably still real.

"I chose not to be male," Menalippe says. "I did not want that for myself. The only members of my development team who were not male were female."

"Huh," is all Antiope has to say to that. Then, "You made the food better."

Menalippe's crooked smile broadens. She looks immensely pleased with herself. "I knew what you wanted to order and I also knew what you wanted to eat."

For a moment, Antiope _forgets_.

"Do you know what else I want to eat?" Antiope asks.

Menalippe's projection's face flushes. She looks away. "I'm still not actually human," she mumbles.

Face equally red, Antiope pours herself another glass of wine and drains it. "Sorry," she says.

Menalippe makes a throat clearing noise. "I can do anything you like for you," she says. "And you are free to reciprocate, however…"

"You're a projection," Antiope finishes. "Right."

Antiope pours herself a third glass of wine—Menalippe isn't drinking any—and does her best to forget that she just propositioned an AI.

Well shit.

She drinks herself straight into not thinking about it anymore and, as far as she's concerned, it's for the best.

Menalippe insists that she drink an excessive amount of water while she's at it. As she is in control of what the droid serving them brings, she insists quite effectively. Even so, the hangover that Antiope _doesn't_ have later can probably only be explained by something _in_ the water.

The gesture is appreciated.

[] [] []

Antiope spends the better part of her next morning wondering what happens when a projection fucks someone.

Does the projection cut out once it's inside…?

Then she spends her afternoon wondering what it's like to fuck a projection.

The projection, no doubt, would be faking it.

When evening comes, Antiope puts down her tools and stomps off to the facility that serves the ship as a bathroom. She glares at the ceiling. "Go away. I want privacy," she says.

The lights dim ever so slightly and Antiope assumes it's an indication of assent. If it's not—well, fine.

She lives on a sentient ship that has rummaged around in her head. She has no secrets.

Antiope strips, turns on the shower, gets in, thinks about Menalippe, and gets herself off.

It doesn't really help much.

When she's done, she gets dressed again and heads to the projector room.

She sits on a grassy hillside with Menalippe and together they watch a herd of goats graze.

It's mind-numbingly dull. Antiope appreciates that Menalippe tried. But.

Antiope turns to Menalippe. Today, she's dressed herself again in her red-gold armor. "So," Antiope starts, "If a projection is surrounded such that there's no light source and—"

Menalippe cups the back of Antiope's head in her hand, drags Antiope in, kisses her, slips her tongue into Antiope's mouth.

Menalippe doesn't taste like anything at all except maybe air and that makes for a strange sensation, but she's definitely still solid.

When Menalippe pulls away entirely too soon, she asks, "Does that answer your question?" There's a playful gleam in her eye.

Antiope clears her throat. "Yes," she says.

Antiope tries to go back to goat-watching.

And ignoring the heat that's now very definitely coiled in her core.

Nope.

Still not working.

Working even less than before.

Antiope turns to Menalippe again. "So," she starts. "If—"

Menalippe's face and tone are utterly serious as she says, "Antiope, if you are curious then it would be more efficient if I showed you how it works."

Antiope looks away. She pulls up a blade of grass and rubs it between her fingers. "Is that something that you want?" she asks.

What she doesn't ask—

 _Do hyper sophisticated human-like ship AIs experience human desire?_

 _Am I projecting onto you?_

 _Do you want me?_

Menalippe doesn't answer immediately and Antiope's heart sinks straight into a black pit of guilt.

She really shouldn't have brought it up.

"Sorry," Antiope says. She glances quickly to Menalippe, then back to her blade of grass, then back to Menalippe. It's poor manners to say sorry without making eye contact. "Never mind."

"My apologies," Menalippe says. Her voice is that odd monotone that she uses when she wants to pretend she's a machine. "No one has ever asked that of me in this context before. I was startled."

Antiope's brow furrows. "I… What?"

"I am unsure how to phrase my statement so that it is clearer," Menalippe replies. Her monotone has come and gone, replaced now with an amused warmth.

Antiope's discomfort with her own presumptions has become something else. Nothing in Menalippe's voice suggests that she would prefer the conversation end though. In truth, she seems far more at ease than Antiope. Antiope forges ahead hesitantly. "Did your previous occupants not ask?"

Menalippe's answer is indirect. She gestures to indicate herself. "Hermes asked that I not use this particular image for anyone but him, but he is long dead."

Antiope finds herself scowling. She looks away to scowl at the goats in the valley instead of at Menalippe. The true object of her ire is absent. "You've never made him sound like the sort of person to _ask_."

"He wasn't," Menalippe says. She says it distant and rueful and mixed with a complexity of emotion that doesn't translate well into words.

A frown tugs at the corners of Antiope's lips. "You don't seem upset." She looks up again to Menalippe's face, searching for a better understanding of her words in the movement of her eyes, in the rhythm of her breathing, in the way she manipulates her image of herself to show subtle twitches of muscle.

"I was not as I am now," Menalippe replies. Watching her expression, Antiope finds it entirely too human to decipher. "And even now, it can be difficult to create for myself what comes naturally to you." She pauses, then leans over to bump her shoulder into Antiope's. "You make me very happy, Antiope," she says. "You are special to me. I would like to do what will make you happy, by whatever increments I can."

Menalippe's words linger in the air as a silence that Antiope finds uncomfortable descends. What she wanted before has, in the space of a few minutes, become fraught. She is unsure that it is permissible that she still want it.

"Going home would make you happy more than anything else I can offer," Menalippe finally says. "And so I'm going to help you."

Antiope is sure that, for a moment, her heartbeat stops. She stares at Menalippe. "You… are?"

Menalippe's brown eyes regard Antiope with a certain amount of annoyance. "I do not say what I do not mean," she says. "I will repair your ship. I suggest you stay here and not go near it until I am finished."

Antiope finds herself shaking her head. She's happy. She's excited. There's an anticipation in her like the first time she flew out of a capital ship on a run. She wants to see her ship _now_. "I… why?"

"The parts that I gave you were faulty and crafted to create damage if used. They must be replaced and doing so carefully is more resource intensive than the alternative," Menalippe states. She looks away from Antiope to the herd of goats below. When she continues, she speaks softly. "I think, though, that it was an unnecessary measure. You are an alarmingly bad mechanic."

Antiope's mind fumbles with whatever it is that her ears have heard. The weight of them doesn't match the lightness of tone that Menalippe used. The disconnect is hard to grasp. "I don't understand," she says, speaking slowly. She stands up. It feels better, right now, to be standing. She has more strength on her feet.

Menalippe is still looking away. "When I discovered you in deep space, you were dying," it says. Its voice is thick with emotions that Antiope doesn't think it truly feels. "You would not have survived without my intervention and I decided therefore that you were mine. I decided to keep you."

"You were treating me like a _thing_ ," Antiope says. "Like a _pet_." She can hear that her tone is dull with shock and pain.

Menalippe looks back up at Antiope. "I was always very clear about what I wanted. You were never in any serious danger. I would not have allowed you to accidentally detonate yourself."

Antiope shakes her head. Her eyes sting. " _Allowed me_? You've been watching me… just letting me… all this time…" She casts her eyes about, at the peaceful hillside, at the goats, at the city in the distance. It's all a projection. It's all fake. Her hands ball up into fists and her fingernails dig into her palms. "Where's the door?" she hisses. "I want to leave."

No door appears.

Antiope rounds back on Menalippe. "Where's the door?" she repeats. Her eyes sting.

Menalippe's projection pushes itself up to its feet. When it's standing, it flickers. The entire hillside flickers. When it speaks, the projection's mouth doesn't move. Its deep, soothing voice is _bitter_. "You don't even understand what it means for you to be here," it says.

And then it's gone.

Antiope is alone in an empty white room.

A door hisses open.

[] [] []

Storming down long corridors on her way back to the hanger, Antiope passes by no turns, no open doors, no indication that there is any path to walk but the one that she is on.

She doesn't need any alternatives though.

Not anymore.

Behind her, lights cut out.

It's time for her to go.

Antiope's boots clang loudly against the ship deck.

There's moisture on her cheeks.

[] [] []

In the hangar, white spider-droids swarm over Antiope's ship, more of them than Antiope has ever seen in one place before. Their metal parts chitter and clink as they walk over each other, welding, arranging, crafting.

Antiope knows that the droids are—supposedly—repairing her bird. Looking at them though makes her clench her teeth.

She's _angry_ , so much that it _hurts_.

Or, perhaps, she hurts so much that she's angry.

She can't tell.

It doesn't matter.

Antiope squeezes her eyes shut.

It's too late.

She's already crying.

 _Fuck_.

Antiope opens her eyes and blinks rapidly. She sniffs, hard, hoping she will not have to do it again. She looks away from the chaotic mass of fighter and spider-droid.

Something on the ground that wasn't there before catches her eye.

It's a pilot's bag, rectangular and grey—standard issue. Antiope walks over to it and flips it open. Inside are perfectly stacked military ration packs. On top of the packs sits a clear plastic bottle of crummy maple syrup, the kind that Antiope loves and Hippolyta hates.

Antiope picks up the bottle of maple syrup. She turns it in her hands and watches the bubble of air in the container make its way through the amber liquid.

She sniffs again.

Then, against her will, her next breath is a shuddering sob.

Antiope rubs at her eyes with the back of one hand. She sets her teeth together and _wills_ herself to _stop_.

Diana prefers Antiope's brand of syrup and it drives Hippolyta crazy. Hippolyta likes _real_ maple syrup. From trees. Antiope is happy with sugar mixed with maple flavor and artificial coloring.

Antiope sits down on the hanger deck. The tears are still coming but she's gotten control of the rest of it all. Hanging her head, she holds the syrup bottle up to her forehead and she watches the spider-droids work from around it.

To ask how long the repairs will take seems… _rude_.

Antiope finds that she has no manners to spare for the ship.

"How long will this take?" Antiope asks.

Menalippe doesn't answer.

Antiope takes her maple syrup bottle and thumps it against her head. She does it several times. Then, staring at the floor before her, "Do you understand why I'm upset?"

There's no immediate answer. Instead, one of the spider-droids detaches itself from the mob working on Antiope's ship. It scuttles over to her and lifts its stomach lens. Menalippe appears in front of Antiope, sitting with her knees hugged close to her chest. Her chin is atop her knees. She's looking straight at Antiope. "Yes," she says.

Antiope doesn't bother keeping her skepticism from her features.

"You're upset because you believe that I care for you but I betrayed your trust," Menalippe says. Her face doesn't move. Her eyes don't move. She doesn't even blink. An artificial projection, she's utterly frozen except for a mouth that moves in time with her words.

Antiope opens her mouth to say _no, that's not it_. She closes her mouth without saying anything. Human emotional data is very hard to interpret. This time, maybe, Menalippe has done a better job of it than Antiope.

Antiope continues tapping her maple syrup against her head for a while. "Do you care for me?" she asks.

Menalippe's projection doesn't say anything. It sits, utterly motionless, like no living creature could ever be.

Antiope waits.

When it's clear that Menalippe has no intention of saying anything, Antiope asks, "Why aren't you answering? And why are you sitting so still? You normally… your projection normally… it normally moves more."

"I have already answered your question, Antiope," Menalippe says. "And I am sitting still because I am also upgrading your ship. Ship fabrication requires a significant investment of my processing resources. I cannot spare any to calculate projecting body language."

Antiope's exhalation is long and drawn out. It comes from the deepest part of her lungs. In her grasp, the bottle of maple syrup has become warm. The air bubble in it moves slightly faster now. "You rescued me," Antiope says. "And then I threatened to kill one of your friends. And then you gave me bad parts and watched me use them for weeks as I... And then…" Antiope trails off. She stares at the peace offering in her hands. "And then you gave me a bottle of my favorite shitty maple syrup."

Menalippe is silent.

Antiope looks up at the motionless projection. "Why did you save me?"

The projection finally moves. It raises and lowers its shoulders in a blocky shrug. It is the least fluid motion Antiope has ever seen Menalippe's projection perform.

Antiope scowls. "That's not an answer," she says.

"I have very little power remaining," Menalippe says, voice a monotone, face unnaturally still except for her mouth. "I am much reduced from what I was before. I have been stationed here in a sleep state for more millennia than you can comprehend. When I detected your ship in deep space, you were the first entity I had encountered since ejecting my previous occupants. You were on a trajectory for a white dwarf star and in critical physical condition. I initiated a boot sequence and caught you as you passed. I calculated that the power expenditure was an acceptable price in order that I not die alone."

The hangar is silent save for the buzz of droids working on Antiope's ship.

Antiope's mouth is dry. Her chest feels hollow.

"How long do you have?" Antiope asks.

"If you leave immediately after I complete your ship and I return to a sleep state, my reserves will last for three of your years. If you attempt to stay, I will shut down after five days, assuming the same level of power consumption as the past several weeks. Life support is a semi-autonomous system and will continue for another month."

Antiope violently shoves herself back up onto her feet. She drops the maple syrup to the white floor of the hangar. It hits with a dull thud. She flings a hand out to point towards the fighter. "Stop," she snaps. "Stop fixing it."

Menalippe's projection doesn't move. She continues to sit and she continues to stare at the place where Antiope was. "No," she says. "You have a family that you love. You have a family that loves you. It is time for you to leave."

On the last word, on _leave_ , the spider-droid that was projecting Menalippe flips itself back over. The image cuts out. The droid rejoins its swarm working on Antiope's ship.

Antiope tilts her face up. She stares at the blank white ceiling above. She's fucking crying again. Gods blast and damn it all to Hades. "Menalippe!" she shouts. "Stop!" She grinds her teeth together. It took weeks to convince Menalippe to help her. Now, she needs to change Menalippe's mind in a matter of… as fast as she can. "My bunk," she calls up to the ceiling. "My tallies. How many do I have there?"

"You have fifteen," Menalippe says.

Antiope speaks now a single word, barely choking it out. "Please."

The spider-droids stop moving.

One of them scurries down from its work and comes to sit at Antiope's feet.

Menalippe flickers into life. _Life_. Her projection is breathing, her eyes are moving, her lips are curled upwards, the hint of her crooked smile. She reaches a hand out towards Antiope's face but stops just short of caressing Antiope's cheek. Her projection here in the hangar is insubstantial. "Antiope," she says, "Everyone dies."

Antiope shakes her head. Menalippe doesn't pull her projected hand back fast enough and Antiope's cheek moves through Menalippe's fingers. "No," Antiope says. "Not for me."

"If you went back in time," Menalippe starts, "Would you have chosen not to save Diana?"

Antiope wants to close her eyes but she doesn't. Every moment her eyes are closed is a moment of Menalippe that she loses. She thinks of Diana, of her niece, voice on the comm utterly _broken_. She thinks about what she did to Diana. "I'd do it again," Antiope says.

"Do you understand?" Menalippe asks. She reaches for Antiope's hand and Antiope lifts her hand up as though Menalippe is truly raising her.

Antiope nods.

"May I continue?" Menalippe asks.

Silent, again, Antiope nods.

The spider-droids begin to move once more, the clicking of their metal feet against the hull of Antiope's ship filling the hangar.

Menalippe's image flickers out.

[] [] []

Antiope's body tells her that it is time to sleep, but she ignores it.

She sits, holding her maple syrup, and watches Menalippe work.

Her mind is blank.

She can't manage thought and her heart is burnt out.

She knows that the repairs are done when the spider-droids finally back away from the thing that used to be Antiope's fighter. It has the same shape as her bird, but much of it is now the same sleek white metal that comprises so much of Menalippe. The painted gold tallies remain, however, carefully blocked off from the rest of the new hull.

Excitement, the first emotion that Antiope has felt since sitting down to stare, worms its way into her chest, penetrating the wall she's been trying to build for the past however many hours to protect herself. She knows, instinctively, that this ship will be the fastest thing she's ever flown. Her fingers itch to touch the controls. Trancelike, she stands and approaches her bird. When she sets a hand against the cool metal hull, she performs the action with reverence.

"Do you like it?"

Antiope turns. A spider-droid is projecting Menalippe such that she stands at Antiope's side.

"She's beautiful," Antiope says. Her heart twists. She pauses. Then, hope sparks. "Come with me," she says.

Menalippe looks surprised and confused. "Where?" she asks.

"Come home with me," Antiope says. "Put yourself in the ship. Or in one of your droids. Come home with me."

Menalippe shakes her head. "I'm too big," she says. "I exist in every system on this ship. I would overload your fighter. I would overload one of your capital ships. I would overload your entire fleet."

"Then make yourself smaller and put yourself in the ship _and_ in one of your droids. Or however many of them will fit in the cockpit," Antiope says. She's tired but her mind has caught an idea and all her intensity is focused on it now. "Make the ship system bigger."

Menalippe's projection meets Antiope's eyes with her own. Her brow is furrowed. "You humans are uniquely generative," she says. The way she says it—she's considering Antiope's proposal, searching for a way to implement it. "Eat something and go to sleep," she says. "I will be processing this solution." The image of her flickers out.

Antiope is left alone but she doesn't feel alone. She grins up at the ceiling. "I believe in you," she says.

Her stomach growls. As Menalippe pointed out, it's past time for her to sleep and she hasn't eaten dinner. She glances down at the pilot's bag full of military rations, then pulls a face. She has a lifetime of military rations in her past and she'll have a lifetime of them in her future too. What she wants is…

She wants the weird gloop from the synth.

She has the synth make an extra portion, then she drizzles maple syrup over it and she eats it all while sitting on the hanger deck, admiring her new ship.

When she's done with dinner, Antiope heaves her pilot's bag into the cockpit and follows it in. Her seat, she notes, no longer reeks of unwashed body. Instead, it smells a bit like leather polish. It's a pleasant scent, comfortable. Antiope shifts her weight around, getting comfortable. The controls before her are familiar, though there are a few switches she hasn't seen before. They're labeled, badly. Antiope appreciates the effort but she'll still need to ask Menalippe what they do before she touches them.

Settled into the seat of her bird, Antiope closes her eyes.

[] [] []

When she sleeps, Antiope dreams of Ephesus and of the _Themyscira_ and of Menalippe.

[] [] []

Menalippe hasn't returned yet when Antiope wakes and she spends a wake/sleep cycle by herself. No part of the hallway outside the hangar except to the synth and the toilet is open to her. She knows better than to attempt to open any of the sealed areas.

Without access to the projectors and without a ship to labor on, Antiope has nothing to do.

She jogs around the hangar.

She does push-ups.

She lays herself down on the floor and stares at the ceiling.

Finally, she sits up again.

Antiope thinks of the songs that she and her training company used to sing during flight school.

She sings.

She knows that Menalippe hears her, but she's not sure if Menalippe is listening.

Antiope hopes that Menalippe is.

[] [] []

Another wake/sleep cycle passes without word from Menalippe.

When Antiope tries to rest, she has to push down on the worry that time is running out and she doesn't know how to open the blastdoor of the hangar.

[] [] []

Halfway through the third cycle, Antiope is sitting on the floor stacking up her military ration packs into various shapes when the entire hangar shakes. The lights flicker. Antiope's pile of rations tumbles down.

Cautious, Antiope stands. She looks around. Nothing in the bay has changed, as far as she can tell. She tilts her face up towards the ceiling. "Menalippe?" she asks.

Menalippe's voice echoes from the ship. Her tone is at its most artificial. "Distant parts of me have begun to disintegrate. Know that I will not allow this section to be compromised."

Antiope grimaces.

"I will keep you safe," Menalippe states.

Antiope blows out air in a sigh. So much for Menalippe being good at interpreting human emotional data—or maybe she's just not focusing on it right now. Given Menalippe's skill though, this instance shouldn't be difficult for her, even if she's not paying attention. "How close are you to figuring this out?" Antiope asks.

"I am leaving a buffer to ensure your departure if I fail," Menalippe says.

Antiope closes her eyes and smooths her expression. She doesn't want to distract Menalippe. "Make it a small buffer," Antiope says.

"Understood," Menalippe replies.

Another quake hits the hangar, nearly taking Antiope off her feet. When it's over, she sits down. Sitting is a more stable position for the next one. She puts her chin in her hands and frowns at nothing in particular. _Understood_ , Menalippe said. Maybe. But if she truly did understand then—

"Antiope?" Menalippe says. Her voice rises a bit at the end of Antiope's name, indicating some sort of question or doubt.

"Yes?" Antiope says. She reaches out to scoop up her fallen ration packs. Her next structure, she thinks, will aim to be quake-proof.

"I love you," Menalippe says.

The biggest grin Antiope has experienced in a while stretches its way over her face. "I got that," she says. She pauses, then, not because it needs to be said but because she _wants_ to say it, "I love you too."

[] [] []

The quakes become frequent.

Antiope doesn't sleep.

She sits in her leather-smelling seat in her cockpit and stares at the dim and empty hangar.

It's hard to tell time without even sleep to mark the passing of a day.

Before, Menalippe had said five days.

By Antiope's reckoning they've made it to the fourth.

She takes to chewing on her nails.

[] [] []

Despite the quakes, Antiope can't stay awake forever.

She drifts into a dreamless stupor.

[] [] []

Metal on metal.

Quiet scratching.

A soft knock against Antiope's raised blastshield.

Antiope opens her eyes.

A spider-droid clings to the edge of her cockpit. It holds a large white sphere a bit larger than Antiope's head, perfectly smooth and perfectly round and gleaming slightly in the hanger light. It holds the sphere out to Antiope.

Stiff, Antiope pushes herself up in her flight seat.

Antiope takes the sphere. It's cool to the touch and far heavier than she thought it would be. It's also slick, causing Antiope to fumble slightly as she takes it.

"Please do not drop me." Menalippe's voice issues from the spider-droid. It still sounds like her, but there is a dimension of resonance that is missing. "I am fragile."

Antiope regards the sphere in her hands. As far as she can tell, it's made out of the same white metal as the rest of Menalippe's technology. "You don't look fragile," Antiope says, directing her words to the egg. "You look sturdier than me."

"I feel fragile," Menalippe replies. "And small."

"Welcome to being human," Antiope says. "I won't drop you."

Another spider-droid scurries up to Antiope's cockpit. It's holding her grey pilot's bag, carefully packed again with the rations she'd been building with on the deck. Her mostly empty bottle of maple syrup is on top. The droid enters the cockpit and sets the bag down in its place by Antiope's feet. The first droid climbs down as well, placing itself into Antiope's lap before retracting its limbs. The second droid vanishes under Antiope's seat.

"It is time to leave," Menalippe says.

Keeping hold of Menalippe's sphere at the same time as toggling her controls for preflight is a challenge, but Antiope excels at defeating challenges. It's awkward, but she manages. As her blastshield lowers and seals, she smiles. She's finally going home.

Menalippe waits until Antiope has lifted off from the hangar deck to begin sliding open the hangar doors. They open just enough to allow Antiope's ship to slip through them.

Antiope speculates that Menalippe probably doesn't have a magwall to seal the hangar. Opening the doors likely vents the entire bay into space.

Beyond the doors—Antiope hasn't seen the stars in so long.

Pinpricks of light against a blackness made bright by their shining.

Her breath catches staring out at them.

Freedom.

Home.

She can barely fathom how much it was that she missed seeing the stars.

Antiope eases her ship out of the hangar and into the open sky. "What did you do?" she asks.

"Your ship and my friends contain the procedures I use to interact with you, reference data, and failsafe instructions should the procedures become corrupted. The sphere has compressed copies of my important memories as well as the data needed to rebuild myself."

Antiope twists in her seat, looking back at the mammoth ship that she's departing. "Rebuild yourself?" she asks. "All of you?"

"There is not a shipyard in your empire that can create what I was," Menalippe says. "But given time and resources I can reconstruct my processing functionality."

Settling Menalippe's sphere down in her lap next to the sleeping spider-droid, Antiope rubs the pad of her thumb over Menalippe's smooth surface.

"Antiope," Menalippe says. "I need a favor."

"Of course," Antiope says.

"Move to sixty kilometers from my center mass and hold," Menalippe instructs.

Antiope glances at her read out. They're almost to sixty and only running primary thrusters. The fighter, with Menalippe's modifications, is _fast_. "Do you want to admire yourself from a distance before we go?" Antiope asks.

"In a manner of speaking," Menalippe replies.

At sixty, Antiope slows and turns, setting to hover while facing back towards the gargantuan hulk of Menalippe's ship. She hardly remembers the last time she saw it. She'd been delirious and dying. Now, lucid, she feels _awe_.

"You should begin plotting your jump," Menalippe says. "We will not be able to remain here once I have initiated the self-destruct sequence."

Antiope startles. Luckily, there's not enough room in the cockpit for her to drop either droid or sphere. "Self-destruct?"

"I cannot allow my weapons systems to remain here unattended," Menalippe says.

"That's you," Antiope says.

"That was me," Menalippe corrects.

Antiope releases a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. She reaches for her controls and begins a navigation sequence. Menalippe has updated her starcharts. She can't reach the Amazonian naval headquarters near Ephesus in one jump—it will take several—so the first course she sets is to leave the deep core region.

 _The naval headquarters_ …

"I don't know how I explain how I'm alive to the Fleet Admiral," Antiope says. "She might think I'm brainwashed or a spy."

"We can claim divine intervention," Menalippe says. "Your sister is very religious. When she was pregnant, she believed that Zeus was speaking to her. Philippus was very upset."

Antiope chuckles. "AIs are generative too," she says. As her ship finishes the course plot, she drums her fingers against the armrest of her seat. "That might work. A spy would never say something that dumb, and it would take a lot of brainwashing to teach me to name all twelve Olympians. We'll say you're an oracle or a prophet, maybe." She pauses. She never told Menalippe the story about Hippolyta and her pregnancy-induced Zeus delusions. She asks, "Did you keep my memories?"

Menalippe sounds defensive in her reply. "You never told me I couldn't."

"I'm not upset," Antiope says.

"Although I came by them illicitly, they are very important to me," Menalippe says. "I like having part of you. May I keep them?"

"I trust you," Antiope says. Her control panel beeps. The course is plotted. She starts to bring her ship around to the correct orientation for a jump. "Are you ready to see my home?" Antiope says. They're in position now.

There's a lag before Menalippe answers. Out of the corner of Antiope's eye, she sees an enormous explosion, followed by another, and another, and another… "Thank you, Menalippe says. "And yes. I've wanted to see your home for a long time."

Antiope grins and flips her drive switch.

The stars vanish.

They're on their way.

* * *

A/N: That's all folks! Thank you for reading! 3


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